Client types in drug-free and methadone treatment: comparison of personality traits

The Drug-Free Therapeutic Community (TC) and Methadone Maintenance Treatment (MMT) modalities provide environmental conditions that are particularly well suited for examining addict personality characteristics suggested as important to the treatment of addiction. This study examines 174 addicts of two programs to determine how their relatedness to others varies with a self-selected treatment modality. Results indicate a generally low relatedness to others for the sample of addicts studied based on measures of the enduring trait associated with dependency on others and the more situational characteristic of interpersonal behavior. The MMT subsample showed greater social dependency in terms of the more enduring personality trait while the TC subsample was more interpersonally oriented based on the situational context. The absence of a relationship between the two measures suggests that there is a self-selection of treatment types which may serve to compensate for trait-related deficiencies or liabilities in addicts, and that the techniques employed by the approaches interact with these personality attributes that are probably accrued in the midst of learning how to cope with troubled familial settings and life as an addict.