Factors Influencing the Attitudes of Substance Use Disorders: A Review from Patients and Health Care Providers Perspectives
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54097/kzj8gx35Keywords:
Substance use disorder, stigma, attitude change, patients, health care professionals.Abstract
Substance use disorder (SUD) is a long-term uncontrolled use of harmful substances such as illegal drugs, prescription drugs, alcohol and tobacco. Despite growing treatment options, SUD remains a public health challenge. This review explores factors of attitudes and cognition that affect both the SUD patient and therapist perspectives. The review mainly focuses on the role of cognition, stigma, implicit cognitive attitude and general explicit attitude. From patients’ perspective, the perception and awareness of having the disorder as well as the self-stigma to SUD significantly shape their attitude and willingness to seek help and treatments. Implicit attitudes unconsciously influence patients' overall attitudes toward substance use behaviors and substance use behavior treatment, as well as subsequent behaviors. For health care providers, stigma, lack of expertise and training in SUD can lead to negative attitudes and inadequate treatment of SUD patients. This may reduce the effectiveness of patient treatment and the likelihood of recovery. This review emphasizes to recognize the limitations of different studies and encourage next steps for improvement. Limitations of different studies including over-reliance on self-reporting, and lack of long-term studies can be improved by adding more follow-up studies on different aspects to update the data and further validate the research on the impact of different attitudes. This review also encourages to increase and popularize the knowledge of SUD, to increase the training of healthcare professionals on SUD to change and influence the attitudes of patients and healthcare professionals.
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