LAUSR

Group Therapies (GT) are a classic technique for the treatment of addictions. In 1988, 94% of outpatient drug treatment centres in the USA used GT (Price et al., 1991). All clinical guides on addictions, including that of Socidrogalcohol (Pascual, Serecigni, Pereiro & Bobes, 2013), include at least one type of GT among their common techniques. Amazon alone offers almost 8,000 publications on GT. However, scientific publications on GT and alcoholism referenced in PubMed have decreased to a third over the last 50 years, and scarce scientific evidence supports its effectiveness (Monras et al., 2000; Weiss, Jaffee, de Menil & Cogley, 2004; Miller & Wilbourne, 2002; Kim et al., 2012). The Socidrogalcohol National Congress in Oviedo addressed this matter (Monras, 2017). The association’s own journal –Adicciones– compiles only 13 references on GT, many only indirectly or as a format for implementing other therapies. The journal’s most recent reference dates to 2015 (Tirado-Muñoz, Gilchrist, Lligoña, Gilbert & Torrens, 2015). The Addictions Unit of the Hospital Clínico de Barcelona (UA-HCB) has more than 50 years of experience with GT. Lately, the feeling was that there were fewer therapy groups and patients in GT. A review of our records of the last 20 years confirmed a gradual decrease of the number of outpatient GT groups by 66%, and of the number of indications for GT/year by 72%. Given that there had not been a significant change in the number of patients treated, we hypothesized that we had inadvertently toughened our criteria for GT indications or had modified the characteristics of the patients seen. Criteria for recommending GT to patients at UA-HCB have expanded from the classic profile of a patient with alcoholism, to those who also consume other substances (mainly cannabis, cocaine and benzodiazepines) and do not have serious psychiatric or cognitive disorders. To detect distortions in the types of patients selected (whether due to excess or shortage) attributable to any variation in these criteria, we transversally recruited 182 outpatients with substance use disorder (SUD) during a consecutive 15-day period and verified their indications for GT and criteria followed. The first surprise was that the average age (51.4 years) and percentage of women (33.5%) was considerably higher, in comparison with previous samples (Monras et al., 2000), and that the treatment duration averaged 20±25 months. Furthermore, the percentage of patients not initially referred to GT was quite high (75%, Figure 1), though it later dropped to 66%. With the same number of patients/ year and fewer indications for GT/year, we must infer that this percentage of indications is lower than previous years. Upon reviewing all patients’ indications for GT (Figure 1), we found that no patients were excluded from GT without an objective reason (137 patients), and most were excluded for more than one reason. To the contrary, a “reAddictions: Old Group Psychotherapies (GP) and New Patients Adicciones: viejas terapias grupales (TG) y nuevos pacientes