A.Millere , A.Pce , E.Millere , Z.Zumente , Lilita Caune , Velga Sudraba , Liana Deklava , Aelita Vagale , Inga Millere
Background: Stress is one of the strongest factors that provoke the use of drugs, which, in turn, highlight the importance of investigating of stress coping skills, especially due to fact that psychoactive substance (alcohol, narcotics, drugs) addiction is a pressing social problem in the whole world.
Aim & Objectives: Determine the drug and/or alcohol addiction patients' recognition level of his/her problem, identify drug and/or alcohol addicted patients' the internal and external motivational dynamics during the treatment, and discover drug and/or alcohol addiction patients' stress coping strategies.
Methods/Study Design: Demographic questionnaire developed by the study authors, SOCRATES 8A/ SOCRATES 8D questionnaires, Treatment motivation questionnaireas well as The Ways of Coping scale.
Results/Findings: There were significant changes in answers of respondents before and after participation in the Minnesota program. In the evaluation of the Stress coping ways scale it was noticed that patients more often use emotions oriented stress coping strategy, the results coincide with other studies in this area. After summarisation and evaluation of Socrates survey data before and after the treatment, such tendencies were noticed - before the treatment less than half of the patients rated their addiction as very severe, but after the treatment more than half of the patients found it very severe. After participating in the Minnesota’s programme the majority of the patients noted positive changes, for instance, recognizing their problem and the ability and desire in keeping these changes in their future.
Conclusion: The program has an impact and effectiveness on patients during the treatment. Participation in the Minnesota program encourages patients to recognize their addiction problems and it guides a deliberate action towards addiction's reduction. The study results suggest that on emotions oriented stress coping strategy is more common in patients with addictions, it manifests as very explicit avoidance.
