Why is trauma treatment necessary? Experiencing a traumatic event can have a powerfully negative effect on a person's life. A traumatic event is when you see or live through something where you feel that your or someone else's personal safety is threatened. Oftentimes, if an individual doesn't undergo any trauma treatment or counseling after surviving this type of incident, they can develop something called post traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. PTSD is a specific type of anxiety disorder that leaves its sufferers in constant fear of reliving the traumatic event over and over again. PTSD has become increasingly common in women as recent studies have indicated that one in three women will be a victim of sexual assault in her lifetime. The leading causes of PTSD in women are sexual assault and child abuse.

The Link Between Trauma and Substance Abuse

PTSD and alcohol and drug use have incredibly high rates of co-occurrence. Almost 35 percent of men who experience PTSD also have experienced problems with substance abuse and almost 27 percent of women experience the same correlation. Trauma treatment plays as significant of a role as it does because it has been proven to be able to break the cycle of PTSD, substance abuse and its subsequent addiction. But first, why do people who've undergone traumatic events have such high rates of drug and alcohol abuse? This leaves us with a bit of a chicken or the egg debate, trying to decipher which part of the dual diagnosis came first. There are two commonly accepted schools of thought with regard to this in trauma treatment:

1. High Risk Theory- This theory assumes that the substance abuse came first, and because the individual was already engaging in such high-risk behavior, that he or she was more likely to experience a traumatic event and thus be at greater risk for developing PTSD.
2. Self-Medication- This theory assumes that the traumatic event came first, and the individual was so affected by it that they started to abuse drugs and/or alcohol to cope with the paralyzing fear they felt as a result of it. Self-medication is a large instigator for substance abuse and addiction in many dual diagnosis cases.

PTSD is very unlikely to go away on its own. This terrifying experience manifests itself into a type of mental illness that takes very intensive trauma treatment to recover from. Failure to get the appropriate treatment needed can result in the abuse of drugs and alcohol, further complicating your ability to recover from its hold on you. A quality treatment facility will treat the co-occurring dual diagnosis of PTSD and substance abuse simultaneously for maximum effectiveness at recovering from both disorders. Attempting to treat one and not the other has been found extremely ineffective as the illnesses influence each other greatly.