Learn More About Drug and Alcohol Relapse

While addiction can be successfully treated using a range of evidence-based treatments, there is no ‘magic cure’ for the condition. Recovering addicts learn to manage their addiction. For many, this gets easier and easier as time goes on, but others describe a lifelong battle.

What is a Relapse?

One dictionary definition of relapse is ‘to become ill or start behaving badly again, after making an improvement’.¹

In terms of addiction recovery, both of those things can apply. Relapsing involves returning to drugs or alcohol after seemingly managing to quit or drastically reduce your intake. It can be known as ‘falling off the wagon’ (especially with alcohol) and it presents a serious challenge for many people struggling with addiction and recovery.

A relapse could see the start of a gradual or sudden spiral back into old habits and the illness of addiction – but it doesn’t have to.

Relapse can be discouraging of course, but it doesn’t have to spell the end of the recovery journey. With the right support in place, or using the strategies and tools you develop in rehab, you can successfully overcome a relapsing episode.

With that said, it is better to avoid relapse in the first place and again, the things you learn in rehab can help you do this. It’s worth noting that relapse can be potentially dangerous, especially with some drugs like opioids and cocaine.

Long-term drug use can see you build a tolerance to the substance and this tolerance can reduce as you go through recovery. This means that using the same amount or strength of drugs that you used to could now be too much for your system, increasing the risk of an overdose.

Outpatient vs Inpatient Rehab Recovery Rates

These overall relapse rates also apply to everyone undergoing treatment for drug addiction and substance misuse issues and disorders. Government figures show that 98% of people undergoing treatment for drugs and alcohol in 2019-20 received their treatment in a community-based setting.

This is the sort of treatment overwhelmingly provided through drug and alcohol services available on the NHS. Only 1% received treatment in a residential setting like that provided by a private rehab.⁵

This means the relapse estimates given above cannot be readily applied to residential drug and alcohol rehabs.

An NHS report examining the role residential rehab has to play within an overall drug and alcohol treatment system also noted that residential rehabs typically dealt with people with the most severe addiction problems, who might have already been through failed community-based treatment programmes and have “longer and more entrenched drug and alcohol misusing careers”.

Despite this, the report found that “the very best rehabs see three-quarters of their residents overcome addiction”.⁶

Not all residential rehabs perform so well, however, and some residents’ recoveries might also include periods of relapse and further treatment along the way.

Another relevant study found that the average number of attempts to recover from addiction was not what most people actually experienced. Subjects of the study had experienced an average of five ‘serious attempts’ at recovery. The median (or middle value) was closer to two or three however, and the mode (or most commonly occurring number) was a single serious attempt.⁷

What all this means is that if one person tried to quit a dozen times, this would pull the average up for the majority of people who only required one serious attempt to quit.