Addiction

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Alcoholism in Young Adults

Alcoholism in Young Adults Alcoholism and alcohol abuse is a growing problem in our society. Daily, people are injured and killed in alcohol-related accidents and this has an effect on each and every person as a result of these occurrences. Whether we are personally involved or have directly suffered from the activities of someone who is under the influence of alcohol, we all suffer from the negative consequences of alcohol. Since we have those who choose to abuse these privileges we need to develop consequences for them. By learning what leads people to drink alcohol, and how this affects their lives, we can then determine what actions need to be taken to help remove ourselves from our ever-increasing attraction to alcohol. Because the abuse of alcohol often begins with adolescents and young adults, most research is based around them. At this particular time in life we hope to find out why these young adults choose to drink, and what motivates them to drink. Michael and Rebecca C. Windle, in their research, were able to show several reasons that provided incentives for adolescents to consume alcohol. Using a written survey, it was determined that the high-school students being studied used alcohol to cope with problems in their lives, including "task-oriented", "emotion-oriented", and "avoidance coping (Windle & Windle, 1996, p. 551)." The only major discrepancies in results between the sexes became obvious when it was shown by Windle and Windle that girls were more likely to use alcohol for avoidance and emotion-oriented coping than were boys, but the boys were more likely to have alcohol problems (Windle & Windle, 1996). Also found was that adolescents drank less often for social reasons than for the aforementioned coping reasons (Windle & Windle, 1996). However, coping motives were responsible for an increased consumption of alcohol (Windle & Windle, 1996). A surprising result of this study was that th...