Why Do People Become Addicted?
Drugs have been around for thousands of years, and have been used medically, therapeutically, and spiritually. What was once used in a common soft-drink to make you feel better is now the subject of multimillion dollar prevention programs. At one point in time in the U.S. history, the woman’s suffrage movement even managed to help make the use of alcohol illegal. Even back then addiction reared its ugly head publicly and the need to control it was prevalent. Therefore, the question of addiction and answers to the problem has been a topic for many decades.
Some of the more recognized factors of why people become addicted include genetic, mental illness, early use, social environment, childhood trauma, life and stress, and co-occurring disorders. Although these causes of addiction are not the only ones, they do cover the biggest area. For example, it has been found that genetics have a large role in becoming addicted, and that more than 60 percent of alcoholics have family members that are also addicted to alcohol. In other words, if your parents were substance abusers, you are four times more likely to become so as well.
Another cause of addiction is mental illness. Many people suffering from mental health issues like depression, anxiety, or other illnesses like schizophrenia, turn to substances to self medicate. Furthermore, these people can be classified as having co-occurring disorders. But what if you are for all intensive purposes mentally sound?
For people who have no history or mental illness, their addiction can come from early use of drugs. Whether this early use was in connection to their social environment or childhood trauma can mean two very different things. What happens when you start using drugs at an early age is that you will most often graduate to worse drugs as you grow older. However, there are different reasons behind starting out so early in life.
For example, those that grow up in an environment filled with drug use will most often engage in it as well in order to either fit in, or live by the code of “if you can’t beat them, join them”. But this can happen to not just children, but also to adults. Being able to fit in with your peers can be stressful at any age as addiction has not age limit. But how else can a child become addicted?
Often times the answer to this is childhood trauma. Such traumas like neglect, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and other extreme negative experiences can cause a child to turn to substances in order to feel better about their situation, or to just forget. All of these events in a child’s life can make them highly susceptible to addiction.
It is important to be able to recognize the signs and causes at any age in order to prevent or treat addiction. It is an age old problem that we have spent years on trying to understand and perfect, and will spend many more years to come in attempting to treat what can hit any one of us.