Some people don’t like to think of drug use as mental health issue, but it is. When determining if someone has an addiction we use the same manual as we do to determine if someone has bipolar. It is a medical model of addiction – addiction is a disease similar to any other chronic disease where a combination of genetics and choices contribute to the problem. Think diabetes, heart disease, etc. Many disorders in mental health are looked at through the same lens, because as pieces of the disease are out of our control, pieces are also within our control and the choices we make impacts outcome.
I won’t go into all of the ins and outs of addiction here, but there is a great presentation I found here that gives a good overview of the medical model and how addiction works. It is a powerpoint that is not too heavy. My reason for bringing this up is some new stats on drug use in the US and the news is both good and bad. This is a survey sponsored by the Substance Abuse and Mental Heal Services Administration (SAMHSA) who conducts yearly surveys of about 67,500 people.
The survey looks at Americans aged 12 and older. It reports overall statistics, and then some by age, drug, etc. On a positive note, the report showed methamphetamine users decreased by about half from 2006 -2010. Considering the devastating impact of methamphetamines this is a real positive and worthy of cheering. However, there were a lot more areas of concerns. Over the past 3 surveys (2008 – 2010) the overall rate of illicit drug use has increased from 8% to 8.9%. In a time when information about the harmful impact of drugs is well known we would hope to see a trend in the opposite direction. Among youth aged 12 -17, the numbers during that time are 9.3% to 10.1%, a reverse in trends from the previous years. An increase in marijuana usage had the biggest impact on these numbers.
This ties into a previous blog I wrote about chicken or the egg in regards to anxiety and self-medicating. Why people use drugs, what drugs they use, the results of the drug use ties in closely with mental health problems. When I see numbers of marijuana users increasing I wonder what is occurring that is driving larger numbers of people, especially youth, to use. Regardless of personal thoughts and feelings about certain drugs, drug use of any kind is escapism at best. Since there is a link between drug use and mental health I worry an increase in numbers has much larger implications then just more teens getting high. We don’t exactly live in times where an increase in numbers is met with an increase in services, so the issue seems to get compounded. This is something I will be paying closer attention to, as I am concerned about the potential outcome.