Mental health is not always synonymous with addiction. However, having a mental health disorder can make you more susceptible and you can develop an addiction. Substance use disorders often co-occur with various mental health disorders especially when they have gone unaddressed.
Some individuals have a blanket understanding of how mental health and addiction affect one another. Due to this, some may think that they are more likely to develop an addiction if they struggle with their mental health. While it is not necessarily that one causes another, it is important to understand each and how they can affect each other.
What Is Mental Health and How Can Addiction Affect It?
Mental health is the condition of an individual’s psychological, emotional, and social status. Housed in the brain and mind are the ability to think, feel, and act. It determines your awareness of life within you and your external surroundings.
Mental health requires a level of maintenance that can ensure your physical health stays intact. When you are in a state of good mental health, you are able to stay balanced in your thinking and your doing. Your mind essentially determines your actions. Mental maintenance of the mind balances the separate, but equal, mind/body dichotomy.
When you are not okay and are having problems with untreated mental conditions, your mind stops telling your body what to do. So you may not always have proper hygiene, maintain a healthy diet, exercise, or do other physical necessities to maintain an overall healthy body.
So when the mind becomes seemingly disabled, it can cause you to seek unhealthy options to cope with what you are feeling. Oftentimes, this is how substance use begins and can lead you to develop an addiction.
What Is Addiction and What Effects Can Mental Health Have On It?
Addiction is the complete and total reliance or dependence on a particular substance or even activity. Addiction to alcohol and substance use enables your will to stay in active addiction.
Sometimes it is simply the introduction to a drug that gets you. The initial feeling that comes with being intoxicated can engulf you and develop an addiction. Just think of the individuals who started out having a drink socially.
That feeling from those few drinks while out with friends became irresistible. It was freeing and came with a sense of being unbothered. All of the wreckage that can plague the mind prior to taking that sip was, at a point, seemingly gone. In chasing the continuance of that feeling, they absent-mindedly became addicted.
It can happen so fast that you do not even realize it. That is how many are currently suffering from addiction and do not even know. Being dependent on a substance or alcohol can lead to depression, anxiety, and worsening mental health.
Am I Likely to Develop an Addiction?
Co-occurring disorders are important to understand. When you wind up in a boat and find yourself drifting in an ocean of addiction and mental illness, it can feel like there’s no shore in sight. Friends and family were the life jackets that you could have used to escape this nightmare. However, you instead used them to drift further out into oblivion.
Addiction is a hard battle to fight and can sometimes go undiagnosed and untreated. When you find mental illness added to the equation, it seems like a fight you may have already lost. However, because there is still air in your lungs, you still have the opportunity to win. This can be hard to even fathom. It can feel like your mind is broken and the only thing you can get it to do properly is find a way to get your next fix.
Something that many fail to realize is that addicts are already survivors even without seeking help. When addiction robs you of everything but you can still muster up the courage to, by any means necessary, get your hands on the one thing that you feel is keeping you going, that is survival at its finest.
So instead of using those survival skills to maintain your addiction, you can use them to climb your way out of it. Treatment can be the next fix. Even if you are only suffering from mental illness and do not have an addiction, there are treatment options and resources for you.
The Warning Signs of Addiction
If you are unsure that you have developed an addiction, there are quite a few signs and symptoms. To name some warning signs of addiction:
- constant, yet unpredictable, changes in mood
- anxiety
- depression
- weight loss or gain
- lack of motivation; feeling lethargic all the time
- instability
- lack of financial discipline
- feeling a need for alcohol or a substance that must be met constantly
These are some of the biggest signs. However, there are others as well.
How You Can Find Help When You Develop an Addiction
Finding help for treatment can feel daunting when you first consider it. However, there is a world of resources and help that you will never know exist until you tap into it.
Here at Laguna Shores Recovery Center, we offer different forms of treatment. Each individual who walks into our doors will receive the best form of treatment that is suitable to their direct needs.
If you are unsure of how you can even stop with substances still in your system, we have a solution for that as well. Laguna Shores Recovery Center also offers a detox program, as detoxing is usually the first step.
In this program, our highly trained staff will use treatment measures that are necessary to prevent and treat any pain or discomfort of withdrawal. We understand the physical and mental weight of making this decision. With this knowledge, we walk with you every step of the way.
Although addiction and mental health disorders are not always direct factors of one another, it is important to understand them individually, as well as co-occurring. Addiction can easily be developed without the presence of a mental illness. However, there are times when addiction is just as easily developed from having a mental health disorder that has not been treated. If you are suffering from addiction, whether it is due to mental health or not, we are here to help. With a specific plan of treatment for your needs, you can start your recovery journey today. Call Laguna Shores Recovery Center today at (866) 774-1532 to find out how we can help.
