Addictionology is a transdisciplinary science dealing with addictions, whether substance addictions or non-substance addictions. Addiction medicine is concerned with prevention, origins, treatment, research, counselling and other contexts. At the NEO Centre we talk about addictive behaviour and look at addictive behaviour as a whole. Thus, we do not compartmentalize addictions to individual addictive substances, but think of your lifestyle as a complex in which addictive behaviors can bring many negatives. 

In addiction counselling, you will map out your current addiction situation and your overall life situation with our specialist. You will look for the causes of the onset, development and duration of your difficulties, ways to eliminate or weaken these causes, how to set up a lifestyle that is more beneficial to you and ways to maintain these changes.  

NEO Center offers an outpatient program, residential treatment program and outpatient aftercare. 

An outpatient addiction program is appropriate when you feel that your addictive behaviors are starting to get the better of you. At a time when your lifestyle is not yet fundamentally impaired or your job is in jeopardy, but you suspect that it might be. It’s also a good format when you need to determine if you need residential treatment. It is a gradual entry to solving your problem. It takes place once or twice a week for 50 minutes. If needed, we also offer psychiatric outpatient care, family or couples therapy, or therapy/counseling for loved ones of our clients.  

A key focus of outpatient treatment is relapse prevention. By relapse, we mean a one-time or short-term return to an undesirable behavior (in the case of addictions, it is a relapse to the addictive behavior – substance use, for example). The aim of this method is to teach you to anticipate and manage risky situations and to deal effectively and quickly with any failures. 

At the beginning, you and your therapist will set a goal that you want to achieve during the sessions together. You decide what you need to change in your life, and we help you find ways to implement and sustain the changes. Our collaboration ends when you feel you have achieved stability again. 

If your addiction is at a stage where outpatient treatment is not enough to change your lifestyle, we guide our clients to residential treatment. This is inherently more intensive – you have the opportunity to work on yourself intensively for several weeks in a sheltered environment. It is possible to take advantage of residential treatment at our clinics where we offer short-term intensive treatment programs of 4-6 weeks. The work on yourself here is very intensive, in just one week you will have 21 hours of group work, at least 2 hours of individual work, 6 hours of meditation and many more hours of informal conversations and activities leading to reflection and promoting change in your life. When indicated, we also engage with the family – our clients have the opportunity to arrange a family meeting as part of their stay, which can educate family members about addictive behaviors and relapse prevention, and can lead to long-term family therapy if needed. We also offer the opportunity for therapeutic support for family members of our clients (with independent therapists, of course) within our outpatient clinic. 

However, the work does not end with the completion of the placement – the changes set during treatment need to be applied to life practice and sustained. Aftercare can help you to do this. This is individual or group work, or a combination of both. Aftercare at the NEO Centre is for graduates of a residential programme in our or another addiction centre.