[Various forms of chronicity in addicted patients at a psychiatric hospital]

Developing differential treatments for addicts implies discrimination of clinically relevant subgroups of addicts. It is common practice to classify patients by their capability to engage in an in-patient therapy covering a period of six month on average. This rough classification offers no starting-point to optimize therapeutic strategies especially for patients with only insufficient understanding of and suffering from their disorder (so-called depraved alcoholics). They are rarely motivated to continue therapy. Most patients at the admission ward for addicts at the State Mental Hospital Weissenau belong to that group of patients. Our study enclosed 362 patients from this ward, and we used the varying disease- and treatment-careers, which differ in duration and/or frequency to make up four subgroups of patients according to that different forms of chronicity. The groups differ in a number of social, treatment- and disease-related features. Guided by clinical practice, such a formation of subgroups can be seen as a first step in the identification of subpopulations of chronic addicted. Conclusions how to complete existing medical care and guidance-patterns can be drawn.