How Mental Disorders Impact Addiction Recovery
While mental disorders and drug addiction may be two different conditions, they tend to co-occur on a frequent basis. Anyone affected by depression, anxiety or any other form of psychological disorder actually faces a higher risk of developing an addiction problem. Likewise, chronic drug abuse tends to breed mental disorder.
According to the Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration, an estimated 7.9 million adults struggled with co-occurring mental health and addiction disorders in 2014. In effect, the need for treatment help becomes all the more critical when mental disorder and addiction take over a person’s life.
Call our toll-free helpline at 888-647-0051 (Who Answers?) for information on available treatment options.
The Relationship Between Mental Disorder and Addiction
Having a mental disorder increases your risk of addiction relapse.
Addiction in any form, be it alcohol or drugs, alters the brain’s chemical system over time. These changes cause disruptions in the brain’s ability to regulate a person’s psychological and physical well-being.
Mental disorder produces similar effects in terms of perpetuating growing imbalances within the brain’s chemical system. These similarities account for why mental disorder and addiction problems tend to “attract” one another.
In effect the chemical imbalances that develop out of compulsive drug use create optimal conditions for mental disorder to develop, according to the University of Utah. Likewise, people struggling with mental disorder are more likely to engage in drug abuse as a means to self-medicate symptoms of mental or emotional distress.
Effects of Mental Disorders on Addiction Recovery
Increased Relapse Potential
For someone recovering from drug (or alcohol) addiction, having to deal with symptoms of depression or anxiety make it all the more difficult to maintain abstinence on a continuous basis, according to the Journal of World Psychiatry.
For this reason, people dealing with mental disorder and addiction face a higher risk for relapse in addiction recovery than people not affected by mental health problems.
Suicide Risks
People coming off long-term addiction problems face an especially hard time in recovery due to the prolonged withdrawal period that develops once drug use stops. In some instances, a person may experience severe depression symptoms for months or even years into the recovery process.
For someone dealing with a co-occurring depression, bipolar or borderline personality disorder the strain of withdrawal-based depression coupled with tendencies towards self-harming behaviors can quickly trigger bouts of suicidal thinking, and even suicidal acts.
Overdose Potential
The potential for relapse remains an ongoing threat for people recovering from severe forms of addiction. Likewise, the risk of overdose increases for every relapse episode experienced due to the brain’s reduced tolerance for the drug.
When relapsing, oftentimes a person will try to pick up where he or she left off in terms of drug dosage amount. As mental and emotional disorders tend to compromise a person’s sense of judgment, the likelihood of ingesting too high a dose is high. Under these conditions, the risk of overdosing increases considerably.
The Need for Treatment Help
Mental disorder and addiction make for a volatile combination, with one condition working to strengthen the other. In the absence of needed treatment help, not only does the rate of addiction increase at a fast rate, but the severity of mental illness grows progressively worse over time.
Getting treatment at the first sign of addiction or mental health problems offers the single best solution for preventing one or both of these conditions from destroying your life.
We can help you find a treatment program that meets your specific needs. Please don’t hesitate to call our toll-free helpline at 888-647-0051 (Who Answers?) to speak with one of our addiction specialists.
