Drug addiction involves many complex factors, including personal, environmental, and social factors. These factors are multifaceted which can be chances for (even push) individuals to be drug dependent. Effects of the factors may change over time. The treatment for drug abuse problems is not simply physical, psychological or medical.
The purpose of detoxification is to enable drug abusers to truly return to normal life in the community. However, it is common that drug users quit the physiological addiction quickly but have difficulties to overcome their psychological addiction of drugs; they often fall into a loop of detoxification and re-addiction. This study attempts to explore the factors related to drug use and treatment through life adaptation of detox processes; the factors are found to enable drug abusers to successfully quit addiction, return to society smoothly, and no longer use drugs.
The study is based on purposive sampling. Letters were sent to the Departments of Education in Taipei, Chiayi, Kaohsiung, and Hualien Prisons: the author asked help from the prisons authorities to find if any successful cases, of "The Plan of Scientific Evidence-based Treatment Model For Drug Abuser" (issued by the Ministry of Justice) and private rehabilitation centers, were willing to be interviewed as research objects. Four successfully-detoxified individuals accepted qualitative in-depth interview research in the study; with those interviews, important factors in detoxification processes for their life recovery were collected and thoroughly explored.
The study found that resilience is a dynamic process of individual, family, and social system levels. During the recovery of life, drug abusers are affected by many protective factors of resilience which are helpful for detoxification. In the process of life adaptation, protective factors are significant for those who are under rehabilitation: positive self-concepts and cognitive attitudes; positive senses of self-worth; willing to be responsible for oneselves; commitment to family and work; social support from relatives, institutions, communities, etc..