One-year sobriety improves satisfaction with life, executive functions and psychological distress among patients with polysubstance use disorder

Our study provides support for the view that there is a clinically and statistically significant recovery of satisfaction with life, executive functions, and psychological distress for SUD patients following one-year of abstinence. This knowledge highlights the importance of time and continued abstinence. Our findings suggest that a gradual and careful step-up of learning requirement should be adopted, and SUD treatment should initially focus on stabilizing the patient and achieving abstinence, while interventions for co-morbid problems and more cognitively demanding treatment components are more likely to succeed later in the treatment sequence.