Substance Abuse and Mental Health
Perhaps the most dangerous and long-lasting effects on a drug abuser are the long-term mental and neurological changes that happen as a result of chemical dependency. In the end, substance abusers are left feeling depressed, suicidal, angry and insecure. This is why it does no one any good to get upset at drug addicts and alcoholics: they already feel worse about themselves than you could ever make them.
Every year, biologists publish new findings on where addiction works in the brain. Every drug of abuse, including alcohol, has strong activity in the centers of your brain that promote survival, emotions and memory. The same part of our brain that would tell us to eat if we were starving is exactly the same mental machinery that tells the alcoholic to drink and the addict to use. This is why it’s so hard to quit. Through a slow and invisible process, the brain is changed by substances to tell the addict that drugging is not a choice, it is a matter of life and death.
In repeated studies, rats presented with food or drugs will choose drugs over food, until they eventually starve to death. The same studies have been done with alcohol to similar results: even with pellets of food at the ready, the rat continually presses the “alcohol” lever until it dies of starvation. We may be smarter than rats, but in terms of the biological processes in our brain we’re very much the same. All this mounting evidence contributed to addiction being classified as a “mental illness.”
