Are There Benefits to Gender-Specific Addiction Treatment?
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Another important thing to know about gender-responsive treatment is men and women who enter gender-specific alcohol and drug use treatment programs tend to stay in treatment longer and have better outcomes than those who don’t. The reason for this fact is that gender-specific treatment programs allow the patient to engage fully in their treatment. While in co-ed treatment, women may be uncomfortable speaking about the trauma that led to their addiction, and men can feel like they need to appear strong and manly. However, when the patient is in a treatment program that only includes other men or other women, they may feel more comfortable opening up to those around them.
Another benefit of gender-specific treatment is that the program can address the unique challenges each gender faces. For instance, those in a women’s addiction treatment program can discuss motherhood, pregnancy, and the challenges they face in the workforce. Alternatively, in a men’s addiction treatment program, they can address anger issues, how to healthily express emotions, and the pressure to appear strong.
Furthermore, gender-specific treatment can provide more effective relapse prevention techniques. Strategies that work well for men may not work as well for women. Conversely, techniques that appeal to women may not be as engaging for men. We will work with both genders to create relapse prevention techniques that will address the unique challenges each gender faces.
Addiction Treatment for Men and Women: A Brief History
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Organized efforts to help people struggling with alcohol and substance use disorders have been around longer than most people realize. Support groups, sobriety circles, and temperance movements first appeared in the U.S. around the 1750s. By the 1850s, one such organization – The Washington Society – claimed a membership of more than half a million people. The New York State Inebriate Society, the nation’s first dedicated substance use treatment center, opened in Binghamton, New York in 1864. The ensuing century saw the rise and fall of scores of asylums, homes, and sanatoriums treating alcoholism and substance use disorders first as failings of individual moral character, then as treatable medical diseases. Even as the movement toward medical treatment gained momentum, the tone of judgment persisted: treatment centers were frowned upon and known colloquially by terms like foul wards, jitter joints, or jag farms. This one-two punch created the heavy stigma still associated with people seeking treatment today.
Though a small number of gender-specific centers did exist, most participants and practitioners were men. It wasn’t until the 1970s that addiction professionals considered the possibility that gender might play an important role in the way men and women develop and recover from addiction disorders. Gender-specific approaches to treatment reappeared in the 1980s. In the 1990s and 2000s, addiction and mental health professionals developed comprehensive treatment approaches recognizing differences and capitalizing on the relative strengths of men and women seeking recovery.
Lakeview Health is at the forefront of the gender-responsive movement in alcohol and substance use treatment and recovery.
