What You Can Learn from Addiction Assessments

Determining if there is an addiction is the first reason for an assessment. Especially with legal substances such as alcohol, prescription drugs, and in some cases marijuana, a person will often want to get an assessment to find out if they have an addiction or not. In reality, for most people, if they are concerned about it, it is probably true, and the assessment is just there to prove that point. But in this scenario, the individual will go to an assessment center and sit with a substance abuse counselor for a couple of hours and converse with them. The substance abuse counselor will ask several questions and go over multiple facets and areas of that person’s life. Furthermore, the individual will gauge the client’s responses and put together a rough estimate of just how bad the person’s habit might be. This assessment is also beneficial for giving an individual closure if they feel like they have an addiction but they do not.

Another very valuable reason for having addiction assessments is to find out what kind of addiction treatment a person is going to need. This is the most common reason for an evaluation. An individual knows they have an addiction, but they do not know what kind of treatment they need to address it. (Please remember, all dependencies are different, and it will take different approaches to address each one.) In this case, the individual goes and gets an assessment to help determine where they should go. In this case, the person presents themselves to an assessment counselor or evaluator and simply states that they have a substance abuse problem, and they want to go to a treatment center, but they need to know what type of center to go to. The counselor will perform a very similar assessment as of the above example, asking many questions and gathering information to be able to map out exactly what form of treatment is needed.

Another common reason why a person gets an addiction assessment is if they need to go to a treatment center but cannot afford it and therefore must go to a paid-for government facility. To get into a governmental treatment center, one always must get an assessment or evaluation first. Even if the person knows exactly the extent of their addiction and exactly what kind of treatment to go to, and evaluation is a part of the intake process. In this case, the person delivering the assessment will most likely select the treatment center for the individual to go to based on the assessment results.