Self-medication The New Epidemic

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Self Medication: The New Epidemic

Untold damage and suffering is caused by alcohol and drug abuse. Each year substance abusers, as well as their families and friends are suffering needlessly. The suffering may continue, treated as addiction rather than as an underlying physical or psychological disorder.
The substance abuser may have many reasons to abuse their substance of choice. To the substance-addicted individual, these reasons are valid. The purpose of reasoning usually is to rationalize repeated use of the drug of choice. Rationalizing allows a chemical abuser to exceed commonly consumed or prescribed quantities.“I self-medicated with alcohol for more than thirty years and became addicted to prescription painkillers for about ten years in a foolish attempt to gain enough control so that I could manage to keep working. The self-medication became the only way, over time, that I could manage to sleep or remain in control enough to function” from Will3481forum member (Bailey, Bi-Polar ForumsWebsite).
Although all drugs seem to affect the abuser in similar ways, the purpose for repeated abuse may have an underlying but illusive cause. One cause for self-medicating may be psychiatric in origin. At the 1996 U.S. Psychiatric & Mental Health Congress, Kathleen Brady, M.D., Ph.D., an associate professor of psychiatry at the Medical University of South Carolina, reported that "substance abuse occurs in 30% to 60% of patients with bipolar disorder and is more likely to co-exist with bipolar illness than with any other Axis I psychiatric disorder" (1996). Dr. Brady goes on to add, "2% to 4% of alcoholics and up to 30% of cocaine abusers meet the diagnostic criteria for bipolar disorder”. Agnes B. Hatfield, Ph.D., approached the statistics from a different view stating that "as much as 50 percent of the mentally ill population also has a substance abuse problem" (Bailey, Bi-Polar Forums Website).
Physical pain may place a pers...