What are the advantages of outpatient care for behavioral addiction?
Outpatient services for behavioural addiction are preferable primarily because you're living in the environment that you're going to live in after all the treatment is completed. With outpatient care, you're going to be faced with the stresses of life that you're going to have to live with later. You're going to have to deal with your relatives or family or friends that you're going to have to confront later. So outpatient care, in my opinion, is the best. Beyond that, there's the cost. There's the idea that you will be able to stay at work and there is no shame and you don't have to leave your job and tell everybody that you're going away to some unknown destination for 3 days. It's convenient and it makes the recovery clear. Outpatient care for behavioural addiction is useful because you're going to talk about the dilemma that you face today and that isn't going to be that different from the dilemma you're going to face six months from now. It's real. It's not an artificial amount of stress or an artificial community of people. It's your real life. Therefore I'm a big advocate of outpatient resources.