Co-occurring mental illnesses and substance use disorders: Evidence from Cyprus

Co-occurrence of substance misuse and mental health conditions is an important problem in the treatment of substance use disorders and mental illnesses. The focus of this paper is to investigate co-occurring disorders with feedback directly to patients on outpatient individual treatment adherence. The study is conducted using data from a randomly selected sample from an outpatient treatment centre of a private psychiatric clinic in Cyprus. Participants are individuals with substance (ab) use disorder and dependence, who had asked for admission and who had been advised to start individual treatment, after a standardized admission assessment with the European Addiction Severity Index (EuropASI). Despite the limitations of this study, the overall results do provide evidence of an association between mental illness and substance abuse. However, it is concluded that more research is needed in order to disentangle the dynamics of this dual relationship.