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Dr Packer is a psychologist in independent practice specializing in treating youth with TD and the associated disorders and consulting with school districts.
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The frequent and unnecessary use of chemical matters to achieve certain effects for the body is what we called drug abuse. These substances may be “street” drugs, unlawful due to their great probability for addiction and abuse. They can also substances acquired with a prescription, used for pleasure rather than for medical reasons.
As an effect, the person slowly destroys his or her body as well as one’s own life. Anyone with drug abuse trouble may find it hard to acknowledge the situation. The person has the tendency to conceal any manifestations of the problem, thus showing the people around that there is nothing wrong. Furthermore, loved ones may not also identify that the the one they love has a drug abuse problem. As a result, the strong dissent and rationalization of the person using drugs makes it very hard to get help, and can make concerned family members feel like they are the problem.
The breaking of the problem of admitting that one is abusing drug is always the big leap to recovery. On the other hand, in wanting to get away from the problem, one should try to find help from others, specifically professionals in the field of substance abuse treatment and the right social support. With no right support, it is very easy to rationalize just one more hit, and withdrawal symptoms can test the strongest resolve. Therefore, peer support, paired with therapy and medication could aid a person who has fallen into the dark side of substance abuse.
During the treatment, drug detoxification could still be needed. A person may still require drug detox services if they are substance dependent and not yet at the point of being drug addicted. In an emotional point of view, there are mild withdrawal symptoms. Detoxification could still help for the reason that it frees the body from the toxins brought by the drug. Moreover, there is a program called the Intensive Outpatient wherein the person in need of help for drug abuse has a stable home environment, excellent support system and is motivated and willing to give up drugs and/or alcohol. They are usually in near the beginning to middle stage drug abuse. If relapse occurs while in intensive outpatient therapy, residential treatment would be suggested. A therapist is also available for an individual therapy with the patient.
There are many treatment programs offered by rehabilitation centers for substance abuse problems. Substance abuse is very likely to become substance addiction if intervention does not take place. Though prevention is still better than cure, drug abuse is a little bit better than addiction. Abusing the use of a drug is still a hopeful case and easier to deal with both by the patient and the therapists, as compared to substance addiction.
So, when a loved one or a family member is likely to be a victim of drug abuse, as early as possible do not hesitate to seek help and face the problem. Usually, in the case of teenagers, parents fall short to recognize if their children are guilty of drug abuse since changes in behavior seemed to be normal among teenagers in their generation today. But, parents should for all time be keen enough to observe some changes that might be linked to drug abuse.
One should not expect anybody who is drug dependent to make a progress right away. It is not as easy as treating a person with cough. Improvement will always be an ongoing process. People must to understand that these people will need all the support they can get most especially from their loved ones. Once sober, an individual who is drug dependent will not quickly be cured. Drug use may have been masking painful feelings that will bubble up to the surface. Many in recovery experience depressed moods for up to a year or more as their brain reestablishes from the drug abuse. Learning new coping skills to defy cravings, and how to relate them in stressful situations, is an ongoing process. Ongoing support is vital to work through those issues.
People who know someone who is drug dependent should always be ready to call for help.
Remember the very first time you sip an alcoholic beverage. What sensations did you feel? What happened to your body? To your senses? What happened to you? Tipsy or drunk, alcohol, as it enters the body, affects almost all of you. Do you commit to memory having to pee every time after having drunk at least 3 shots of alcohol? Or have you felt the world spinning around you while you take that last sip of vodka? These are just few of the effects of alcohol and what it can do to your body as well as to your health.
Carbon and hydrogen are the main chemicals that makes up alcohol. The active ingredient in alcoholic beverages is ethyl alcohol, also known as ethanol. It is a colorless and nearly tasteless fluid that is easily and quickly absorbed by the body. Alcohol is actually a depressant contrary to it being popular as a stimulant. It wears down the role of all living cells, especially those in the brain. Anesthetics and tranquilizers belongs to the same group as alcohol.
After being take in, alcohol is not being digested. Alcohol quickly goes through our body, quickly affecting our tissues and organs. It quickly comes out in the bloodstream, and its intoxicating effects are felt within a few minutes. That explains the heat you feel after having taken in several rounds of any hard drink. The body begins quickly to try to get rid of the alcohol. It is absorbed through the small intestine directly into the bloodstream. It then proceeds to the liver, where it is broken down. However, when it is took in at a faster rate than the body’s metabolism can handle (about one 12-ounce can of beer per hour), alcohol builds up in the bloodstream and is distributed throughout the body. The higher the concentration of alcohol, the greater the disturbance it has on body cells. Severe disruption of function can occur and can cause death. The effects of alcohol on various organs will be discussed in more detail below.
The brain and most parts of the body are directly affected negatively by alcohol consumption. The organ most sensitive to alcohol is the brain. Alcohol affects the entire body, but its effects on the functions of the brain are the most obvious -and to the person who is drinking, the most important. People drink alcohol because of the way it makes them feel, without considering the damaging effects on the brain itself. The brain reacts to alcohol in stages. The first portion of the brain to be affected is the cerebrum – the outermost layer, which is accountable for controlling the senses, speech, understanding, and judgment. Alcohol depresses first the parts of the brain that regularly control actions and emotions. It appears as if alcohol -although it is a depressant -is acting as a stimulant because, as these higher centers of the brain are knocked out, the drinker feels free from moral and legal restrictions. Animation and the lost of inhibitions are the product of losing these restraints. The alcohol keeps on to slow down brain functions, resulting in slurred speech, unsteady walk, blurry vision, and loss of co-ordination. Drinkers often feel that their physical skills have been improved because their decision has been impaired, while in reality their reaction times are slowed and their muscle coordination is less efficient. Next, the drinker experiences various exaggerations of the emotions that can vary from violence and aggressiveness to tearfulness and withdrawal. If a person don’t stop drinking, the body protects itself from further damage by “passing out”. Alcohol destroys brain cells which, unlike the blood cells it also destroys, are irreplaceable.
Like most treatments, alcohol addiction treatment is never easy. Alcoholics would mainly deny the fact that they are alcoholics. Thus, the first step in treating alcohol addiction is letting the person recognize that he has become dependent with alcohol and that this dependency is a serious problem that requires treatment as soon as possible. Alcohol addiction treatment would entail medication and cognitive-behavioral therapy. Therapy is important in treatment because alcoholics need to have a change of lifestyle. They need to cope with life that is alcohol-free. This is not as easy as one, two, three. It entails hard work, commitment, discipline, and the unending support of family and friends.
Alcohol addiction brings a great damage to our body specially the brain that is why it needs quick treatment.
Yes, there is such a thing as sex addiction as well as love addiction. It is not just merely crazily stalking a person you especially like. It is an illness, probably a mental illness that entails compulsivity when it comes to sexual activities and having numerous partners, and being fond of casual sex and self gratification. Sex and love addiction is a progressive illness which cannot be cured but which, like many illnesses, can be arrested. It may take several forms—which includes, but not limited to a compulsive need for sex, excessive dependency on one or many people, or a chronic preoccupation with romance, intrigue, or fantasy, an obsessive compulsive pattern, either sexual or emotional, or both, exists in which relationships or sexual activities have become increasingly destructive to career, family and sense of self-respect. Sex addiction and love addiction, if left unchecked, always gets worse.
Victims of sex and love addiction has a found a way to help their illness. Sex and love addiction was born. This was founded by a previous Alcoholics anonymous member. Though, he had been sober, he was unfaithful to his wife for a period of time. He founded sex and love addiction anonymous as an try to discontinue his compulsive sexual and romantic behavior.
The organization encourages members to identify their own “bottom-line behaviors.” The organization identifies these behaviors as “any sexual or emotional act, no matter what its initial impulse may be, which leads to loss of control over rate, frequency, or duration of its occurrence or recurrence, resulting in spiritual, mental, physical, emotional, and moral damage of oneself and others.”
To aid their group members on the road to recovery, Sex and Love Addiction Anonymous utilizes the 12-step program and the 12 traditions. The excellent thing with the organization is that since everyone is a victim, they are empathic about each other’s experiences and feelings. Thus, they claim to understand what the other person is going through and are able to offer support through sharing and meetings. To quote, “we found in each other what we could find nowhere else: people who knew the depth of our pain. Together we found hope and the care of a loving Higher Power. Our commitment is to help others recover from sexual addiction, just as we have been helped.”
Sex and Love Addiction Anonymous’ twelve-step program are the following:
1. We admitted we were powerless over sex and love addiction – that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with a Power greater than ourselves, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to sex and love addicts, and to practice these principles in all areas of our lives.
Meanwhile, these are their Twelve Traditions:
1. Our common welfare should come first; personal recovery depends upon S.L.A.A. unity.
2. For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority — a loving God as this Power may be expressed through our group conscience. Our leaders are but trusted servants; they do not govern.
3. The only requirement for S.L.A.A. membership is the desire to stop living out a pattern of sex and love addiction. Any two or more persons gathered together for mutual aid in recovering from sex and love addiction may call themselves an S.L.A.A. group, provided that as a group they have no other affiliation.
4. Each group should be autonomous except in matters affecting other groups or S.L.A.A. as a whole.
5. Each group has but one primary purpose — to carry its message to the sex and love addict who still suffers.
6. An S.L.A.A. group or S.L.A.A. as a whole ought never to endorse, finance, or lend the S.L.A.A. name to any related facility or outside enterprise, lest problems of money, property, or prestige divert us from our primary purpose.
7. Every S.L.A.A. group ought to be fully self-supporting, declining outside contributions.
8. S.L.A.A. should remain forever nonprofessional, but our service centers may employ special workers.
9. S.L.A.A. as such ought never to be organized; but we may create service boards or committees directly responsible to those they serve.
10. S.L.A.A. has no opinion on outside issues; hence the S.L.A.A. name ought never to be drawn into public controversy.
11. Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio, TV, film, and other public media. We need guard with special care the anonymity of all fellow S.L.A.A. members.
12. Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities.
Heroin is a highly addictive drug derived from morphine, which is obtained from the opium poppy. It is a “downer” that affects the brain’s pleasure systems andinterferes with the brain’s ability to recognize pain. Thus, it is used as pain killer or as a recreational drug. Moreover, it has an extremely high potential for dependence.
Depending upon the preference of the user and the drugs’ purity. Heroin can be used in different ways. It can be injected into a vein, injected into a muscle, smoked in a standard pipe, mixed in a marijuana joint, inhaled as smoke through a straw, known as “chasing the dragon,” snorted as powder via the nose.
After a single dose, the short-term effects of abusing heroin appears and in a few hours disappear. After an injection of heroin, the user reports feeling a surge of euphoria accompanied by a warm flushing of the skin, a dry mouth, and heavy extremities. Following this initial euphoria, the user goes “on the nod,” an alternately wakeful and drowsy state. Mental functioning becomes clouded because of the depression of the central nervous system. Other effects included slowed and slurred speech, slow gait, constricted pupils, droopy eyelids, impaired night vision, vomiting, constipation.
A certain period of time is needed for the appearance of the long-term effects of heroin. Chronic users may develop collapsed veins, infection of the heart lining and valves, abscesses, cellulites, and liver disease. Pulmonary complications, including different types of pneumonia, may result from the poor health condition of the abuser, as well as from heroin’s depressing effects on respiration. In addition to the effects of the drug itself, street heroin may have additives that do not really dissolve and result in clogging the blood vessels that lead to the lungs, liver, kidneys, or brain. This can cause infection or even death of small patches of cells in vital organs. Tolerance develops with regular use of heroin. This means the abuser must use more heroin to achieve the same intensity or effect.
As higher doses are used over time, physical dependence and addiction develop. With physical dependence, the body has adapted to the existed of the drug and withdrawal symptoms may happen if use is reduced. Withdrawal, which in regular abusers may occur as early as a few hours after the last administration, produces drug craving, restlessness, muscle and bone pain, insomnia, diarrhea and vomiting, cold flashes with goose bumps (“cold turkey”), kicking movements (“kicking the habit”), and other symptoms. Major withdrawal symptoms hit the highest point between 48 and 72 hours after the last does and collapse after about a week. Sudden withdrawal by seriously dependent users who are in poor health can be fatal.
Moreover, the withdrawal syndrome from heroin may start within 6 to 24 hours of discontinuation of the drug; however, this time frame can fluctuate with the degree of tolerance as well as the amount of the last consumed dose. Symptoms may include: sweating, malaise, anxiety, depression, priapism, extra sensitivity of the genitals in females, general feeling of heaviness, cramp-like pains in the limbs, excessive sneezing, tears, rhinorrhea, sleep difficulties (insomnia), cold sweats, chills, severe muscle and bone aches; nausea and vomiting, diarrhea, cramps, and fever.
Heroin addiction, just like any other drug addiction starts with occasional use of the drug, which later on would become a habit. This is so because it causes some chemicals in the brain to become dependent to the drug. Moreover, the body itself desires for the drug because of its pleasurable effects. It is relaxing, thus the person feels positively about the drug. And even though it gets to the point that the drug is slowly destroying the person, he or she could not get away with it anymore, because he or she has become dependent on heroin. Thus, when the drug intake is suddenly ended, the person experiences withdrawal symptoms. With this, professional help is needed for recovery.
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