About Suchttherapie

Suchttherapie

Suchttherapie is a German medical specialist journal for addiction prevention, addiction treatment, and addiction research, published quarterly in Stuttgart by the Thieme Group, and the younger, more clinically and ethically oriented counterpart to the Hogrefe journal Sucht. Appearing since 2000 in print and online, with ISSN 1439-989X, it is the official organ of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Suchtmedizin (German Society for Addiction Medicine) and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Suchtpsychologie (German Society for Addiction Psychology), and its 2024 volume was the 25th. Its editor-in-chief is Jens Reimer. The journal deliberately questions established doctrines to support controversial approaches in the professional discourse, a programmatic stance stated in its own self-description.

Overview

Suchttherapie appears quarterly in the Georg Thieme Verlag of Stuttgart, in a print edition and online via Thieme Connect. The sold circulation is reported at 880 copies with a distributed circulation of 870, modest figures that reflect the journal's highly specialized audience of addiction professionals and its society-based distribution. The journal's contributions are meant to address the various medical specialties and are editorially prepared accordingly: they cover addiction treatment, prevention, and research, alongside current basic science, and they address political developments related to the field, from drug policy to the regulation of addiction therapy training. The journal consciously questions doctrines and dogmas to support controversial approaches in the specialist discourse, and its contributions are meant to appeal to the various medical specialties with editorial preparation that makes them accessible across disciplines.

The readership is physicians, psychologists, and therapists working in addiction medicine and addiction psychology, in clinics, practices, and rehabilitation facilities, including the members of the two societies for which the journal is the official organ. The journal's imprint lists an editorial board drawn from the addiction field, including Anne Koopmann of the Clinic for Addictive Behavior and Addiction Medicine, Gallus Bischof of the University of Lübeck's addiction medicine unit at the Center for Integrative Psychiatry, and Angela Buchholz of the Institute and Polyclinic for Medical Psychology at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, reflecting the journal's clinical and academic anchoring across northern and southern Germany.

History

Suchttherapie was founded in 2000 with a starting circulation of 1,200 copies, appearing in the Thieme Verlag both as a print version and online, at a time when German addiction medicine was professionalizing and seeking its own scientific organs. It established itself as the official organ of the German Society for Addiction Medicine and the German Society for Addiction Psychology, giving the two societies a shared scientific forum and their members a journal that speaks to both the medical and the psychological dimensions of addiction work. The journal's programmatic stance, questioning established teachings and dogmas, positioned it as a venue for controversial approaches in addiction treatment, from harm reduction to the ethics of treatment goals, and its editorials have repeatedly taken up the normative questions of the field.

Over the decades the journal has documented the field's debates: cannabis and crime, with the 2016 focus topic summarizing the German data on cannabis consumption and criminality; personality disorders and addiction, with the 2022 focus topic on the frequent comorbidity of cluster-B personality disorders and addiction and its treatment by disorder-specific psychotherapies; the training of addiction therapists amid quality assurance, regulation, and staff shortages; and the ethics of addiction work, from the justification of abstinence as a treatment goal to the normative background of house rules in addiction facilities. The 2024 volume carried abstracts from symposia on the further training of addiction therapists, addressing the great shortage of skilled workers that endangers the security of care in outpatient and inpatient rehabilitation, and discussing the access requirements for the profession, from employment in recognized rehab facilities to the exclusion of related fields.

Coverage and Content

The journal publishes scientific contributions on addiction treatment, prevention, and research, with focus topics (Schwerpunktthemen) that illuminate a theme from multiple angles: cannabis and crime, personality disorders and addiction, and similar clinically relevant complexes. The 2008 editorial already posed the field's foundational ethical questions: those who work in addiction care intervene in people's lives through the treatment goals they set and the methods they use, and for every such determination the question of justification can be asked, from the everyday rules of treatment facilities to the fundamental question of why illegal drugs should remain prohibited while harmful legal drugs remain permitted. The contributions address the various medical specialties and are editorially prepared to be accessible across disciplines, so that a psychiatrist, a psychologist, and a social worker can all find their entry point into the same issue. Current basic science and political developments related to addiction are also covered, and the journal's symposium abstracts document the field's continuing-education events, giving each issue a thematic anchor beyond the individual articles.

The journal's ethical dimension is distinctive: it consciously questions doctrines, asking why abstinence should be the goal of a rehabilitation measure, why traumatic life experiences such as sexual abuse should be worked through in treatment and paid for by the pension insurance, why a patient who relapses during inpatient treatment should or should not continue to be treated, or why a substituted patient should live entirely free of addictive substances, cigarettes included. This willingness to interrogate the normative foundations of addiction work, extending from everyday treatment decisions to fundamental drug policy questions, sets it apart in the German medical journal landscape.

Organization and Ownership

Suchttherapie is published by the Georg Thieme Verlag KG of Stuttgart, in the Thieme Group, one of Germany's leading medical and scientific publishers, whose e-journals platform hosts the journal's digital edition. It is the official organ of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Suchtmedizin and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Suchtpsychologie, the two societies that give German addiction medicine and addiction psychology their institutional voice. The editor-in-chief is Jens Reimer, and the journal's production management, subscription service, and institutional sales team are documented in its online imprint, which also carries the legally required publisher information of the Thieme Group. The imprint lists the production management, subscription service, and the editorial board members from university addiction clinics. Financial details of the journal are not publicly confirmed.

Digital Presence

The journal's digital home is Thieme Connect, where articles appear with DOIs and abstracts in German and English, and where the publication history of each article, from online publication date to volume and issue assignment, is documented. The Thieme imprint PDF presents the journal's masthead online. The journal is indexed in the medical databases, and its articles' reference lists document the German-language addiction literature. Social media activity is not publicly confirmed in detail, and the journal's presence rests on its print edition, its Thieme Connect digital edition, and its society functions, a tripod that has carried it through more than two decades.

The Forum for Addiction Therapy

Since 2000, Suchttherapie has been the Thieme journal where German addiction medicine and addiction psychology conduct their scientific discourse: a quarterly forum that questions dogmas, addresses the ethics of treatment, and documents the field's evolution from abstinence paradigms to differentiated, evidence-based care, issue by issue and focus topic by focus topic, in the Thieme tradition of medically rigorous specialist journalism, serving the addiction professionals of the German-speaking world since the turn of the millennium.