Who Succumbs to Addiction?
September 4, 2011
Well, it feels like fall, so I thought I could start to tackle all of Sam’s belongings – what to throw away, what to keep, what to donate, what to sell. I managed to get through one bag of throw-outs, and one box of donates, and then I lost it. After 2 years, the grief is like a knife, and touching what Sam touched, and reading what Sam read, and seeing what Sam wore was too much. Another day I’ll try again.
I read an article in the NYTimes by Dr. Richard Friedman about who falls to addiction, and who doesn’t. He refers to a study by the National Institute of Mental Health that finds that patients with mental health problems are nearly 3 times as likely to have an addictive disorder as those without. And 60% of those with substance abuse issues also suffer from another form of mental illness. It is unknown whether addiction predisposes someone to mental illness, or vice versa.
He goes on to write that the depressed and anxious patients in particular turn to alcohol and other sedatives. Sam turned to alcohol and opiates, which are terrible antidepressants with only worsened the problems he had. That led to more depression and addiction.
Dr. Freidman further goes on, “Drug use changes the brain. Primates that aren’t predisposed to addiction will become compulsive users of cocaine as the number of D2 receptors declines in their brains, Dr. Volkow noted. And one way to produce such a decline, she has found, is to place the animals in stressful social situations.
A stressful environment in which there is ready access to drugs can trump a low genetic risk of addiction in these animals. The same may be true for humans, too. And that’s a notion many find hard to believe: Just about anyone, regardless of baseline genetic risk, can become an addict under the right circumstances.”
“Who can experiment uneventfully with drugs and who will be undone by them results from a complex interplay of genes, environment and psychology. And, unfortunately, just plain chance.”
Then I think of Sam, who had the genetic risk, who was put into stressful social situations of divorce, new family, new houses, new school, new everything, and it was a disaster waiting to happen.
And how I miss him.
