Addiction: What It Is, Causes, Symptoms, Types & Treatment

Most individuals are exposed to and use addictive drugs for the first time during their teenage years. According to Travis Hirschi’s social control theory, adolescents with stronger attachments to family, religious, academic, and other social institutions are less likely to engage in delinquent and maladaptive behavior such as drug use leading to addiction. Environmental risk factors for addiction are the experiences of an individual during their lifetime that interact with the individual’s genetic composition to increase or decrease his or her vulnerability to addiction. Genes identified in GWAS for drug addiction may be involved either in adjusting brain behavior before drug experiences, subsequent to them, or both. Addictive drugs cause a significant increase in this reward system, causing a large increase in dopamine signaling as well as increase in reward-seeking behavior, in turn motivating drug use.

What Causes Drug Addiction?

Yes, addiction is a disease — it’s a chronic condition. It’s crucial to seek help as soon as you develop signs of addiction. Addiction can significantly impact your health, relationships and overall quality of life. Addiction is a chronic (lifelong) condition that involves compulsive seeking and taking of a substance or performing of an activity despite negative or harmful consequences. Addiction is a chronic condition that can affect many aspects of your life, including your physical and mental health, relationships and career. Relapse is viewed as an opportunity for learning and strategy adjustment, with the ultimate goal of eliminating or terminating the targeted behavior.

What is the outlook for addiction?

When looking at abuse liability there are a number of determining factors in whether the drug is abused. The questions ask about lifetime use; frequency of use; urge to use; frequency of health, financial, social, or legal problems related to use; failure to perform duties; if anyone has raised concerns over use; attempts to limit or moderate use; and use by injection. The screening component asks about the frequency of use of the specific substance (tobacco, alcohol, prescription medication, and other). Symptoms of withdrawal generally include but are not limited to body aches, anxiety, irritability, intense cravings for the substance, dysphoria, nausea, hallucinations, headaches, cold sweats, tremors, and seizures. Withdrawal refers to physical and psychological symptoms experienced when reducing or discontinuing a substance that the body has become dependent on. Tolerance is the process by which the body continually adapts to the substance and requires increasingly larger amounts to achieve the original effects.

Why do some people become addicted to drugs while others don’t?

The transtheoretical model can be helpful in guiding development of tailored behavioral interventions that can promote lasting change. Action involves actively modifying behavior by making specific, observable changes to address the addictive behavior. They might have taken preliminary steps, like gathering information or making small commitments, in preparation for behavioral change. The likelihood of engaging in and sustaining similar addictive behaviors is influenced by the reinforcement and punishment observed in others. Albert Bandura’s 1977 social learning theory posits that individuals acquire addictive behaviors by observing and imitating models in their social environment.

Recognizing unhealthy drug use in family members

The signs may be evident, or they may build slowly over time. Ongoing drug use can change how you make choices, remember things, and manage stress. Long-term substance use can change how these areas work. “The alterations in this circuitry can lead to difficulty controlling use.” Everyday joys (such as food, hobbies, or time with loved ones) may start to feel dull in comparison. At first, you might use a drug to feel good.

What is the most common addiction?

When you stop or cut back on drugs or alcohol, your body and brain may react. But if you’ve misused drugs or alcohol in the past or have family members who have, you may be at a higher risk. After a while, these brain changes can make you find and take drugs in ways that are harmful and beyond your control. With treatment, many people manage addiction and live full, healthy lives.

• Some scholars have proposed evolutionary explanations for addiction, suggesting that vulnerabilities to substance or behavioural dependence reflect by-products or dysregulated expressions of reward and learning systems that were adaptive in ancestral environments.
• The American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) defines addiction as a chronic brain disorder.
• Although personal events and cultural factors affect drug use trends, when young people view drug use as harmful, they tend to decrease their drug taking.

Once you’ve been addicted to a drug, you’re at high risk of falling back into a pattern of addiction. If your health care provider prescribes a drug with the potential for addiction, use care when taking the drug and follow instructions. Physical addiction appears to occur when repeated use of a drug changes the way your brain feels pleasure. During the intervention, these people gather together to have a direct, heart-to-heart conversation with the person about the consequences of addiction.

• Ultimately, the project found that art was an effective medium for empowering both the artist creating the work and the person interacting with it.
• Taking some drugs can be particularly risky, especially if you take high doses or combine them with other drugs or alcohol.
• Sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish normal teenage moodiness or anxiety from signs of drug use.
• The arts can be used as an assessment tool to identify underlying issues that may be contributing to a person’s substance use disorder.

About Cleveland Clinic

The reward pathway, known as the mesolimbic pathway, or its extension, the mesocorticolimbic pathway, is characterized by the interaction of several areas of the brain. This phenomenon is notable since, in humans, a dopamine dysregulation syndrome, characterized by drug-induced compulsive engagement in natural rewards (specifically, sexual activity, shopping, and gambling), has been observed in some individuals taking dopaminergic medications. Chronic addictive drug use causes alterations in gene expression in the mesocorticolimbic projection. ΔFosB expression in these neurons directly and positively regulates drug self-administration and reward sensitization through positive reinforcement, while decreasing sensitivity to aversion.note 2

Drug seeking behavior is induced by glutamatergic projections from the prefrontal cortex to the nucleus accumbens. In humans and lab animals that have developed an addiction, alterations in dopamine or opioid neurotransmission in the nucleus accumbens and other parts of the striatum are evident. Altered dopamine neurotransmission is frequently observed following the development of an addictive state. The most important transcription factors that produce these alterations are ΔFosB, cAMP response element binding protein (CREB), and nuclear factor kappa B (NF-κB).

The prevailing culture can have an influence on drug taking behaviors, along with the physical and psychological effects of the drug. Heath’s findings challenged the notion that ‘continued use of alcohol is inexorably addictive and damaging to the consumer’s health’. This model is widely used in contemporary clinical practice and public health because it accounts for a lot of variablity in addiction trajectories, relapase patterns, and treatment outcomes across several individuals. This includes learning processes, impulsivity, reward sensitivity, and the use of substances as coping mechansims for negative affect or trauma. Music therapy was identified to have potentially strong beneficial effects in aiding contemplation and preparing those diagnosed with substance use for treatment. During the course of treatment, by examining and comparing artwork created at different times, art therapists can be helpful in identifying and diagnosing issues, as well as charting the extent or direction of improvement as a person detoxifies.

In Asia, not only socioeconomic factors but biological factors influence drinking behavior. If treatment begins too early, it can cause a person to become defensive and resistant to change. Vaccines have been identified as potentially being more effective than other anti-addiction treatments, due to “the long duration of action, the certainty of administration and a potential reduction of toxicity to important what happens after taking cocaine once side effects and safety organs”. Addictions that have been floated as targets for such treatment include nicotine, opioids, and fentanyl. There are a few drugs with a specific chemical makeup that leads to a high abuse liability.

Sometimes called the “opioid epidemic,” addiction to opioid prescription pain medicines has reached an alarming rate across the United States. Opioids are narcotic, painkilling drugs produced from opium or made synthetically. Due to the toxic nature of these substances, users may develop brain damage or sudden death. Some commonly inhaled substances include glue, paint thinners, correction fluid, felt tip marker fluid, gasoline, cleaning fluids and household aerosol products.

This can create an unhealthy drive to seek more pleasure from the substance or activity and less from healthier activities. Substances and certain activities affect your brain, especially the reward center of your brain. A significant part of how addiction develops is through changes in your brain chemistry. Addiction is the most severe form of a substance abuse disorder. Your brain chemistry changes with addiction.

Data analysis demonstrates that psychological profiles of drug users and non-users have significant differences and the psychological predisposition to using different drugs may be different. Such addictions may be passive or active, but they commonly contain reinforcing features, which are found in most addictions. Addiction can exist without psychotropic drugs, an idea that was popularized by psychologist Stanton Peele. It was developed in 2009 at Yale University on the hypothesis that foods high in fat, sugar, and salt have addictive-like effects which contribute to problematic eating habits. The Yale Food Addiction Scale (YFAS), version 2.0, is the current standard measure for assessing whether an individual exhibits signs and symptoms of food addiction. This impairment in self-control is the hallmark of addiction.

About Mayo Clinic

By bringing experiences of addiction and recovery to a personal level and breaking down the “us and them”, the viewer may be more inclined to show compassion, forego stereotypes and stigma of addiction, and label addiction as a social rather than individual problem. Artists who have personally lived with addiction or undergone recovery may use art to depict their experiences in a manner that uncovers the “human face of addiction”. This form of advocacy can help to relocate the fight of addiction from a judicial perspective to the public health system. Artists attempt to change the societal perception of addiction from a punishable moral offense to instead a chronic illness necessitating treatment. It can influence healthcare policy, making it difficult for these individuals to access treatment. The KFD can be used in family sessions to allow children to share their experiences and needs with parents who may be in recovery from alcohol use disorder.

In humans, twin studies into addiction have provided some of the highest-quality evidence of this link, with results finding that if one twin is affected by addiction, the other twin is likely to be as well, and to the same substance. These altered brain neurons could affect the susceptibility of an individual to an initial drug use experience. For example, altered levels of a normal protein due to environmental factors may change the structure or functioning of specific brain neurons during development.