The healing process for substance use disorders begins with a serious evaluation of an individual's use of alcohol or drugs. All Change appears to follow a series of stages, which is more spiral or circular than linear. Most people in early recovery progress from sobriety to relapse and back to sobriety. Most growth begins with recognizing guilt, embarrassment, and shame regarding regression (relapses) to previous stages of alcohol and drug use. Therapeutic healing can be accomplished by addressing the social determinants of health that influence many lifestyle choices and keeping our focus on the public health concerns of the community. From a behavioral health perspective, combined population health and public health focus would best be defined by the clinician’s attention to both the biomedical issues and advocacy efforts to intervene and influence these complex social, behavioral, and environmental factors that affect individual members of diverse populations within the communities that one lives and works.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.