Addiction and Depression

In My Humble Opinion
1

Addiction. It’s a touchy subject, right? Interestingly, it’s not so bad, socially, to be addicted to cigarettes. It doesn’t wreck your life like other addictions, cancer aside. Sure cancer will wreck your life, but Alcohol can wreck your life in the space of a month or less. Who will agree to being labeled an alcoholic? Not always the people who should. It’s easy to say that certain people who are, aren’t willing to admit it. On the other hand, it’s hard to deny it when somebody accuses you of it.

A thread by Autolycus got me thinking. I don’t want to discuss him here because it’s not necessary. But I’ll put myself in as an example.

I’ve wondered at times in my life if I’m an alcoholic. I’ve gone through phases where I’ve been severely depressed, these phases tend to coincide with heavy drinking.

Now I don’t drink as much, and have hope in my life. But I still go out on weekends.

A little background. I moved to Denmark to do my MA, after a year, I got so sick of my studies that I dropped out and moved to Copenhagen to get a job using my old degree. I got a “temporary” job in a bar. This job ruined my life. I was poor, and I had no prospect, after not getting hired on work-permit related grounds. It’s so easy to recognize it now that I’ve gotten past that job. It reminds me of how much I disliked my old girlfriend after we broke up. All of the things she did to me became totally obvious after I had lost any emotional connection.

Now I have a plan for my life and have no need to escape reality. I don’t drink that often, and I am pretty happy with my life at the time. It could be better, but I’m happy for once in a long time. I have a plan.

I’d like to say that I’m the kind of guy who has high expectations for what I want to do with my life. When my plans came tumbling down I was depressed and poor and had nothing to do.

I wouldn’t consider myself clinically depressed. My depression was based totally on my external surroundings compared to what I believed I should have. How can you not be depressed when you feel you are possibly wasting your life and not going anywhere?

I feel lucky in that I was able to see through the problem and not blame it on alcohol or clinical depression. Not that people aren’t alcoholics or, clinically depressed.

The question is this: You see someone who is depressed and drinks a lot. I don’t always see that as being an alcoholic. There is a tendency, I believe, for people who are depressed to turn to their addictions (alcohol, drugs, food) in order to make themselves feel better. How do you save these people?

I think the question is how you get into these situations. If you start off with a happy life, but like to drink too much, leading to cascading problems and depression resulting therefrom then yes I can certainly see alcohol being the main culprit.

What about someone who loses their wife and kids due to a car wreck and starts to drink to dull the pain. This is a casual drinker, we have here. Is alcohol his real problem? I don’t think so. Alcohol is certainly part of the problem, but the real source is the personal lost that must be dealt with. Alcohol is preventing him from facing his problems.

My personal way out of my depressed existence was quitting my job. I was demoralized at least twice a week, either by my boss or my customers. I didn’t care about my work because I hated it, which affected my work. I drank at work (allowed) in order to dull the antagonization of the awful customers who had no respect for me. I had no energy when not at work to actually get my life together. On the other hand, I made enough money to get by and was too scared to quit because I was afraid of having no income. It was a vicious circle. But I did quit and my life has been infinitely better.

In this way, I feel it is a bit too easy to see someone with destructive behavior and blame it on alcohol. Alcohol makes the problem much worse and can become the only problem, to be sure, but I think that people need to take stock and understand first why they are in this situation. And the tendency of alcoholics to deny drinking problems only compounds this because those trying to help think that it’s a useless defense.

I’m not accusing anyone here of taking this approach, but what do you guys think about this? Are we too quick to judge in this area?

2

When depressive symptoms occur in the presence of substance use/abuse, the only way to really be able to accurately diagnose what the underlying problem may be is to remove the substance and re-evaluate the symptoms over time. Generally 6 months substance-free is a good time frame to rule in/out underlying depression and a variety of other mental illnesses.

Also, most normal drinkers don’t use alcohol to self-medicate for reactive depression for longer than a few months. Alcohol ends up not working well for their symptoms anymore, and they stop. Non-alcoholics with endogenous depression usually behave that way also.

3

Alcoholism and any addiction are problem by themselves. Despite why one may have started using substances is irrelevant. It has become something by itself. What you seem to be talking about is dual diagnosis. Someone who has a major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorder, etc who also uses drugs/alcohol. Both are seperate, co-occuring problems. Kinda like having cancer and HIV. One did not cause the other and both have to be treated.

As a substance abuse/mental health counselor I have encountered 2 basic drug/alcohol user–Compensatory and Celebratory. People drink/use to escape or to have a good time. If one is a compensatory user and has never learned how to deal with life’s difficulties, then that person is likely to develop a psychological, if not a physiological dependence, on that substance. It becomes the primary coping mechanism. Like you did. Your life basically sucked and the only way you could deal with it was to drink heavily. You eventually figured out how to cope with things without drinking.

The Celebratory drinker/user is looking for the perpetual party. Basically, the only way this person knows how to have fun is to get f*ed up. They never learned how to fun and stay sober while doing it, thus everything is boring unles under the influence.
“You ever see a 5 dollar bill?”
“Yeah.”
“You ever see one when you’re stoned?” ::hysterical laughter::
You get the idea.

Substance abuse treatment is a tough thing. There are as many ways to treat addiction as there are people who have opinions about it. Denial is not as common among substance dependent individuals as most people think. Most addicts/alcoholics know they have a problem, they aren’t going to admit it to you. And if you think about it, why would they. Most people would only tell them to stop drinking/using. Kinda like me telling you to stop having sex. It is effectively a threat to take away one of that person’s primary source of pleasure or escape.

Addiction is a brain disorder. It essentially a malfuntion of the reward system.

So to answer you last question…Yes, many people are too quick to judge a person addicted to drugs or alcohol. It would be great if it were a moral issue because then we could stick every junkie or drunk in church or some other religious/spiritual place and fix them.

4

You are fortunate in that you don’t seem to be chemically addicted. Others are not so fortunate, become dependent on the chemical high (the ones with the dysfunction of the reward system), and are not able to end the dependency by an exertion of will. The people who are not physiologically addicted need to thank their lucky stars that they were not made that way rather than looking down on people who are.

And yes, people who still fail to understand that many such problems are actually illnesses - malfunctions of physiology - continue to blame alcoholics and addicts for their problems. It’s just one more stigma that needs to be wiped out.

5

My sister was in an abusive relationship (in the “she has scars from cigarette burns” sort of abuse). We pulled her out. She was drinking pretty heavily. She ended up - over the course of several months - in rehab. Despite two trips through rehab, she was apparently never diagnosed as an alcoholic - she was - in the opinion of several doctors - “self medicating” the pain and depression and stress. Over the next six months (with rehab and therapy) she managed to pull herself out of her abuse of alcohol - and she is now capable of being a social drinker. She is on anti-depressants still. We believe her former boyfriend is an alcoholic - so the behavior was being modeled and encouraged.

Part of her issue getting off alcohol was that she was told not to mix alcohol with the anti-depressants - and anti-depressants take time to work. So she was preferring to drink herself into oblivion because it was more efficient, and not take the anti-depressants at all.

We feel fortunate that she apparently never crossed whatever line exists between emotional addiction - which it was possible to break (but I don’t think even that much was easy for her) - and physical addiction.

6

That would be pretty depressing all right. You would want to consider other symptoms such as weight gain or loss, changes in sleeping habits and so forth. It’s always good to remember that it’s very hard to judge your own situation when you are in a state of clinical depression. Certain judgment centers of the brain can be affected.

Someone else might look at the exteriors of your situations and think: Wow! I’m young and living on my on in Northern Europe! Not everyone gets to do this!

If I were to go into a deep depression, the first thing that I should do is stop all alcohol intake. I don’t drink very much anyway, but it is a depressant.

Good OP. Tak fer det.

7

I always drank fairly heavily - but socially.

For the last 15 years I’ve been in constant jaw pain from a wisdom tooth that went wrong.

Work gradually got worse, old long term clients moving out of the business, realistically I should have gone back to employment, but the jaw pain is like a ball and chain.

Five years ago my long term partnerette suddenly died, at which point I started drinking antisocially ie: at home.

A very stupid GP tricked me into taking antidepressants supposedly for my jaw, mixed with alcohol I pretty much went off the planet - unfortunately in public - but it taught me how to drink while minimizing the hangover. (Two bottles of red wine on an empty stomach followed by heavy carbohydrate and protein knocks me out as if hit with a sledgehammer)

Basically I would say that I’m depressed, actually I would be insane not to be depressed.
Also I am an alcoholic - in so far as I physically crave alcohol and consciously prefer being drunk to being sober.

I don’t put the fact that I’m hacked off down to alcohol, but it has made me reclusive, slightly paranoid (read that as sensitive) and screwed my sleep patterns. I find it difficult to deal with unpleasant and/or stupid people - something I used to be good at.

If my jaw stopped hurting I would be back to my old self in a few weeks, if I gave up alcohol I would lose what appears to be my sole escape route.

I’ve considered dope, but it makes me stupid, which I hate.

In my view use of alcohol is a symptom, a way of coping, but it has unpleasant side effects.

8

Don’t worry, I feel alright now. I’m pretty darn happy at the moment after having quit that awful job. It was so demoralizing. Now I’ve got something new and I am pretty good at it, and it pays pretty well, so that’s a great situation. Plus the weather’s great, all the girls are out in the city. But to the point, now I only drink when I go out (maybe one to two nights a week) I generally don’t get stinking drunk, though. Not that I ever did. My preferred thing is to sit with a few close friends and have interesting conversations and such. But the culture here is definitely to go out. I wish I could just have people over like I have in other countries, but here it’s really planned in advance.

As for sleeping patters? Who can tell, I had a job that required me to stay up until 7AM most nights, so judging from that point of view it’s difficult to measure. Luckily with my new job, I can’t even be the slightest bit off, mentally, to do a good job. It requires intense concentration for periods of 3 hours usually. It’s quite demanding, but I enjoy the challenge. I’m a bit dissapointed that I can’t work today, actually, since I’ve got nothing to do.

As for the, “Wow, I’m living in Northern Europe” thing, it’s pretty old hat by now. I’ve been doing it for the past 4 years, and while I occasionally do it, the novelty for me is going home to visit the folks. I don’t think I could objectively say anything about my state, but I think I do a pretty good job of it. I came to the city with a certain hope, and the more I realized that this dream wouldn’t work out, the more depressed I got. I eventually reached the point to take action.

In my situation it is a bit harder to separate the alcohol from the thing that was screwing up my life (working in a bar). It’s not like I was working a day job and returning home at night and hitting the bottle. I was drinking at work because it was there, and the only way to dull the shittyness that was that job. In other jobs, there’s other escapes. In my temp job there was the internet. When I worked maintenance it was just a nice sit in the shade. The effects of the drug in me, though, were certainly the same for anyone else who drank it for whatever reason. It’s just that when I think back I think, “Yay, I don’t have to be in a bar all the time” When I’m in a bar, I want to drink. Not get drunk, necessarily, but have a few. I wouldn’t drink much at work, but enough to cause the lack of motivation, for sure.

The other problem that I’ve been dealing with is the fact that I’ll never make it in Europe, my adopted home. But I’ve got a plan now to go back to uni (probably in belgium) and study IT there. I’ve always loved computers since I could use them (around 12) and I gotta say I don’t know why I never got into them. But at least I realize now that I can still do it and there’s a future in it.

9

A few random but I think relevant points on my part.

In my experience Bi polars drink to calm themselves down in the "high"state but because of the delayed reaction of the alcohol drink beyond optimum,the alcohol depresses them so next day they start drinking to try and cheer themselves up.

Many bi- ps who often dont realise that they are different to other people can keep up this cyclical drinking with short breaks all of their lives.
Alcohol is a very non specific drug, a bit like curing your broken arm but all your teeth fall out.

Some peoples lives are genuinely awful so they are acting logically by using that which is available to them to make their existence endurable.(not speaking about my life here)

Some people drink to eliminate fear,stress ,worry ,fatigue or even boredom.
One persons contentment can be anothers rut from hell.

The clinically depressed are actually seeing the world as it really is .
With no real evidence of any god or afterlife why do we bother getting up in the morning?
All of our creations,successes,loved ones die when we ourselves die.
Its the rest of us who are deluded.

Dope has had a very good success rate with some alcoholics but not skunk and not for everybody.

Alcoholics I have spoken to always describe the buzz thay get as being more like a sedating high then the more wham bang sensation most of us get.
Its my guess that their chemical/brain interaction is different from the norm either from birth or as a result of the alcohol long term.

Depression is a self perpetuating condition in that sufferers are often too fed up to take even the most basic self help steps.
I have found that extreme fear or an extreme adrenaline rush ALWAYS dispells depression.

Fresh air,natural light and sensory stimulation are also of major help.
I am referring to clinical dep.not reactive dep. which is a natural reaction to adverse events.

Genuinly depressed people do not make “cries for help” they just want to die and are often successful first time.
They tend not to be found hanging in the main hallway or lying next to an empty pill bottle at times just before the rest of the household are due back from work.

Dep. is an incredibly serious disease that Iwould suspect might kill more people worldwide then H.I.V and the various cancers but that is only my opinion.