South Carolina Inpatient Drug Rehab Centers

You might find the story above deeply familiar and deeply upsetting. Living with an addiction like this, and trying to keep a mental illness under control, can take up a significant amount of your energy and leave you feeling completely isolated and alone. The truth is that you're not alone. In the 2009-2010 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, researchers found that 250,000 people in South Carolina 18 and older had at least one depressive episode in the year prior. Many of these people likely turned to drugs and alcohol as they hoped to recover.

Mental Illnesses and Addictions

We live in a do-it-yourself culture in which independence is praised more than almost any other attribute a person might have. Someone who has a mental illness might be encouraged to handle the issue alone, using the tools that are readily available. Addictions can readily follow this kind of self-medication, as your mind might really come to believe that it needs access to these drugs in order to feel simply normal. While medications can be helpful for some people who have addictions, you might have developed a secondary addiction to the medications you were provided, and you might have started abusing those drugs by taking doses too close together or taking doses that are much bigger than those your doctor recommended.

Lack of Awareness

Some people who have mental illnesses are quite aware that their conditions exist and that their mental health could be playing into an addiction, but other people are deeply unaware of their mental health status. For example, the Treatment Advocacy Center states that about 50 percent of people with schizophrenia and 40 percent of people with bipolar disorder have damage to specific parts of the brain, and as a result, they're incapable of understanding that they have an illness. These people might feel miserable, but they might not know why.

It's also common to have an addiction without an underlying mental illness at all. The compulsive behavior, constant lying and lack of connection with others can be just as disabling as having another type of mental illness, however, and that's why some national organizations place addictions in the same category as other mental illnesses.

We Can Help

Whether a mental illness is standing behind your addiction issue or you have an addiction that's just making you feel sad, low and miserable, we can help.

We can help you find the right South Carolina drug treatment center to meet your needs.