Depression Feeds Addiction In The Worst Way
Depression is a blackness of the soul that saps the will, draining the color from life. It’s the antithesis of happiness, a condition where a loved one feels worthless. Self-medicating these feelings would be an ill-advised move (www.everydayhealth.com). We’d be treating the symptoms and not the source of the problem, but addicts consistently take this path, cancelling dark feelings for a time by turning to addictive substances. The act is one of desperation, of purposely entering states of inebriation and drugged highs to fill the pit of despair. It’s a hopeless solution, one destined to fail, but a temporary solution is better than nothing to a mind lost in bleak contemplation. Depression linked to addiction is a norm in society when this self-medication path is taken, but this route is no replacement for love and professional treatment. The solution is transitory, a relief or numbing of unbearable feelings of sadness, but that’s often regarded as enough for a loved one whose perspective has become tragically skewed by the two mental illnesses.
Clinical studies analyze these cause and effect cycles. Perhaps desensitization to a favored drug has triggered intense unhappiness, or a bipolar diagnosis has sent the patient in search of a synthetic aid to numb feelings of melancholy. The end result is the same, an inextricable linking of the two illnesses until the cravings of substance dependence feed off of despondency. Severe depression linked to addiction underlays the scenario as co-dependent diagnoses are formed and lives are taken by an overdose or a suicide driven by a black despondency. Developing correlations actually show how similar areas of the brain are accessed when addiction and clinically depressive thought patterns occur together (www.drugabuse.gov), a state of dual diagnosis that must be treated if we’re to break the cycle of mental illness supporting addictive behavior.