Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Behavioral couples therapy BCT , a treatment approach for married or cohabiting drug abusers and their partners, attempts to reduce substance abuse directly and through restructuring the dysfunctional couple interactions that frequently help sustain it. In multiple studies with diverse populations, patients who engage in BCT have consistently reported greater reductions in substance use than have patients who receive only individual counseling.
Historically, the treatment community and the public at large have viewed alcoholism and other drug abuse as individual problems most effectively treated on an individual basis.
Many investigative teams answered the call, initially with small-scale studies and, as evidence of effectiveness accumulated, by means of large-scale, randomized clinical trials. Their results confirmed the early promise of marital and family therapy.
Meta-analytic reviews of randomized clinical trials have concluded that, in comparison to interventions that focus exclusively on the substance-abusing patient, both alcoholism and drug abuse treatments that involve family result in higher levels of abstinence see, for example, Stanton and Shadish, Three theoretical perspectives have come to dominate family-based conceptualizations of substance abuse and thus provide the foundation for the treatment strategies most often used with substance abusers.
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The family disease approach, the best known model, views alcoholism and other drug abuse as illnesses of the family, suffered not only by the substance abuser, but also by family members, who are seen as codependent.
