Addiction clinics treating more patients; Many seeking help in worse condition

Addiction clinics throughout the Netherlands are noticing an increased demand for care, and many addicts are waiting longer to seek help. Many of the people they treat are “more dead than alive” when they come in, addiction clinics told the Volkskrant.

“Heavy levels of filth in the house. Urine everywhere. The gentleman only ate toast with mayonnaise,” addiction doctor Jelmer Weijs at the Jellinek location in Amsterdam told the newspaper. “The gentleman used to order groceries online but couldn’t get it to work. That’s why he went outside yesterday. Locals found him lying, shaking, on the ground and called the ambulance.” He went on: “This patient is still alive, but that is actually a coincidence. It didn’t have to come to this.”

And that isn’t the only bad case at the Amsterdam clinic. There is a man in his forties who “vomits blood, drinks ten 500 ml beers a day, snorts cocaine, and can barely eat.” A man in his sixties “sits in front of the window all day, sometimes collapses, and drinks three bottles of wine a day.” And a GHB addict “who was in a coma in intensive care until a few days ago,” Weijs mentioned three of the nine people in the high care department.

All rooms in the addiction clinic are full, Weijs said. That is happening more and more, while “the emergency list is getting longer and longer.”

According to Jellinek, an addiction care institute with locations in Amsterdam, Utrecht, Het Gooi, and Amersfoort, addicts are deteriorating much more before they seek help. Other addiction clinics, including Brijder in Noord-Holland and Zuid-Holland, notice the same. “And we also see it among addicted homeless people on the street,” said Martijn Leerdam of the Rotterdam Paulus church.

“We see the burden of care increasing, and we don’t know exactly why,” Kim ten Katen, a psychiatrist and director of treatment at Jellinek, told the Volkskrant. She noted that Jellinek is treating more and more homeless migrant workers who ended up on the street after losing their jobs. “A few years ago, we had five homeless Eastern Europeans in treatment every year in Amsterdam, but now there are more than a hundred registrations per year. We cannot treat them all,” she said. “It is a group that is difficult to help because they are uninsured. They are not entitled to almost anything, not even to night shelter.”

Addiction doctor Hjalmar Hansen of the Jellinek Outreach Team, who checks in on addicts at home for whom no bed is available, told the Volkskrant that patients are slipping further and further before seeking help, and he has no clear explanation for this. He suspects its partly due to the hardening of society. Grocery delivery services don’t help either. “In the past, alcoholics still had to go to the supermarket. Now they can have the alcohol delivered to their home, and no one will notice that their clothes are full of piss stains and that they have lost all their decorum.”