Rehabilitation center Choice || History of development of the program on substance abuse treatment in Ukraine | Drug addiction | Rehabilitation of drug addicts

You will become a human only when you will learn to see a human in another one. - A. N. Radischev

The centre history counts more than 20-ty years. In 90's it became clear, that the traditional narcological service cannot help dependent person. Restructuring of the Soviet Union has affected narcology at once. The militia (police force) has ceased to deliver drug addicts to a compulsory treatment, and it is difficult to name voluntary treatment behind a barbed wire and lattices as a "treatment". Private narcological offices offered help system at which habitual drugs were replaced with soporific and neuroleptics. It only strengthened the dependent person in opinion that it is impossible to overcome dependence. At that time we already understood, that at the heart of drug addiction, as well as many other human problems, lays deficiency of relations with people, that a drug addiction - is not simply the pleasure received from substance abusing, that this problem is much wider. And at the heart of it are not biological, but socially-psychological factors, therefore a treatment for it can be only qualitative other, salutary relations with people (socio- and psychotherapeutic methods). Rehabilitation was needed. There was a foreign experience, but experts have been assured, that the western rehabilitational technologies cannot be immediately applied in Ukraine in view of features of mentality and absence of the trained experts. It was necessary to synthesize domestic rehabilitational programs.

Beginning of the state experiment,
Dnipropetrovsk, 1993

Rehabilitation center "Choice",
Poltava, 2003

Constructing of new center,
Poltava, winter 2004

"Complex Program for the Substance Abusers Treatment and Rehabilitation" (L. A. Sauta, 1993) has been developed in one of the Dnipropetrovsk regional narcological dispensary units, which has a long-term experience of psychotherapeutic work with substance abusers. The program has received a high appreciation of experts of the CIS and foreign professionals, approval and support of the Ministry of Health of Ukraine, and it has been taken as a basic for the state experiment on treatment and rehabilitation of substance abusers and their relatives (1993 - 1997, Dnipropetrovsk). The main task of the experiment was reception of lasting and qualitative remissions. The program was distinguished by a distinct socially-psychotherapeutic orientation. Using of persons experience who have overcome addiction and psychotherapeutic work with families of patients was essentially new for the clinical practice in the CIS. It was one of the first attempts in the CIS to consider the substance abuse wider than just a biological process. Results of the experiment have been presented at many Ukrainian and international conferences, including the World psychiatric congresses in Madrid in 1996 and in Hamburg in 1999. Employees of the centre have published about 30 articles in scientific editions.

In process of experiment, parents who have overcome addiction in their families and who wished to share their experience with others, founded nongovernmental organization in Dnipropetrovsk – the "Care Association for people suffering from a substance abuse". On one of the experiment stages there was a necessity for creation of workplaces for the persons, passing rehabilitation. It was necessary, that the person in a therapeutic situation get labor skills, study to earn his own money, allocate this money and trust in his own possibilities. With this object the Association established the enterprise "Choice" in 1996.

When the completion of the experiment in 1998 the Association and the nongovernmental organization "Choice" founded rehabilitation center "Choice" – the new nonmedical-type nongovernmental structure. Further, families who overcame addiction in the centre "Choice", organized parent clubs in various regions of Ukraine - Poltava, Kiev and Kharkov.

A modern inter-regional rehabilitation complex "Choice" constructed by parents in gratitude for the life-saving of their children has existed on the bank of the Vorskla river in Poltava since 2005.

Rehabilitation center "Choice", Poltava, summer 2008

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