I recently heard from a family friend who happens to be a family support specialist/ drug counsellor that if anyone abuses any drug that affects the emotional state of a person he or she upon stopping the intake of the drug in question will experience a reversal/ change of emotional frame of mind and thus their mental development is affected permanently.
In simple english I was told that the person will go back to the mental age and state they were before they took the drug or drugs in question and their brain will cease to develope or mature beyond that point.
Can anyone shed some light on that one? I would love to hear peoples’ views on this and try and see if they can link the statement above with their experience of drugs whether it be from a personal experience or with someone else around you.
If anyone has any questions on this topic I will not hesitate to answer them and clear up any misinterpretations or misunderstandings of what I’m tryinjg to put forward here. The questions can be from the point of view of any school of thought and I will TRY to answer them so as to extract as much information as possible to try and help explain this and it’s utmost significance and relevance to each and every one of us interested.
Folks who use mood-altering drugs consistently to avoid experiencing negative emotions tend to get emotionally arrested development-wise at about the age that they began using heavily. This often isn’t that apparent until they stop using the drugs, when you suddenly have a 37-year old with the emotional responses of a 19 year old.
But with continued abstinence, the emotional age generally can catch up with the calender age in just a few years.
I heard something similar to this a few years ago, but it was about alcohol.
There was an article in the local paper about a local 14-year-old girl nearly dying of alcohol poisoning. An “expert” was talking about the effect that alcohol has on the development of the brain. Specifically, the part of the brain that affects a person’s inhibitions and ability to use good judgment. This is the same part of the brain that alcohol suppresses when a person is drunk.
According to this expert, this part of the brain is the last to fully develop, hence the tendency of teenagers to be impulsive and their frequent failure to consider the consequences of their actions. The expert stated that this part of the brain isn’t fully developed until around age 20, and that this is why the drinking age is set at 21. Frankly, that sounds to me like a bit of backwards-rationalization, since the drinking age was set at 21 long before they made these brain discoveries, but there you go.
In any case, the expert went on to describe how the development of this part of the brain is stunted when large amounts of alchohol are consumed before age 20, and how this damage can be permanent. She explained that this is the reason you sometimes meet people in their thirties who behave like teenagers: immature, irresponsible, and completely lacking in good judgment. They drank too much as teenagers.
I am not talking about the general metabollic state being affected mate, I am talking about the emotional and social development of the person being affected solely.
I hear what people say about the drugs they take and what they do to their lives on a daily basis. In my general experience these people can and may look physically older after x amount of time you’ve known them but they still seem somewhat stuck at square one and cant, from an EQ point of view, gain any ground or build to a normal degree on the content of their character and personality. They will always exhibit signs through any manner that they are as a whole still largely in touch with the person they were just before they abused drugs.
For the most part is it fair to say that the younger you are when you abuse drugs, the greater the expectation of mental and emotional development issues?
Are you drinking caffeine to cover up/change bad feelings? Do you do this for all your bad feelings? Does it work?
If no, then I’d expect you’ve continued to develop emotionally since age 5.
However, if you’ve been consuming cocaine just about every time you get to feeling bad, in order to feel good (even tho there’s no reason to feel good, except for the cocaine) and then you stopped, I’d expect you to have the emotional development of a 5 year old.
my last post was primarily aimed at ‘‘glee’’ just for the record. ‘‘Qadgop the Mercotan’’ can you please explain the term ‘emotionally arrested’ for me in as much detail as possible it’s the first time I’ve ever heard that phrase to be brutally honest.
On the note of reversal or ‘catching up’ after the occurence of abuse followed by cessation, I have a hypothesis if I may be so bold to put forward and say that if there are mood and emotional altering therapies and therapies being the key word here that are available such as anti-depressants and anti-psychotics, would it be fair to say these drugs re-regulate mood and sometimes (if not all the time when the correct therapy is found) aid the mental redevelopment of a person to such an extent where it can be said that each individual psychiatric drug treatment may play pivotal roles with their ‘counterparts’ as it were, whatever a therapy’s counterpart as such may be?
NOTE: By ‘counterpart’ I mean this and let me go into a bit of detail. If therapy ‘A’ exerts its effect in area ‘X’ of the brain where the drug causing damage was exerting it’s effect, we can assume that one is the others ‘counterpart’.
The more drugs you do, the less you do of anything other than drugs. You don’t get that back. But, you do get to get on with your life, after you give up the drugs. That is, of course not including the possible time you waste in prison. You don’t get that back either.
I do not mean to be getting at a time spent/lost issue but rather an issue that affects mental and emotional maturity based on your biological makeup rather than your misallocation or misappropriation of one’s limited time here
the time spent and lost is a mental and emotional maturity issue, my friend. You only go around once in life, and if you go around stoned, you don’t get anywhere. And you do live with the consequences of that.
It sounds to me like **QtM **is talking about being “emotionally arrested” in a behavioral sense - a person who uses a drug to numb themselves from feeling bad will not learn healthy strategies for dealing with stress. We call “learning healthy strategies for dealing with stress” emotional development, and we expect that a normal 30 year old will have more of them and more useful ones than a 17 year old. This seems pretty intuitive: numb yourself, and you won’t learn how to deal with pain any other way. It also seems intuitive that someone who’s behaviorally emotionally retarded could, with effort and help, “catch up” to the strategy level of a normal functioning adult.
But I think what **davybhoy **is looking for is information on the physical and chemical changes that psychotropic drugs (including alcohol, I assume) can have on one’s brain development, and if there is an organic retardation in brain development, not merely a behavioral stunting in emotional development. He’s especially interested in whether such an organic retardation is ever reversible.
Forgive me if I’ve erred, but it seems as if people are talking past each other here, and I thought maybe a restatement might help. I don’t have any actual answers at this time.
I believe what the OP’s original source was saying was probably intended along the lines of what QtM is saying.
FWIW, I agree with QtM – it’s not about the mood- or mind-altering substance per se, it’s about using that substance to avoid experiencing negative feelings. Since maturing – in a psychological, not a physiological, sense – is about learning to deal with negative feelings, if you avoid doing so, you stop maturing.
I think I understand what Davybhoy is asking and I’ve wondered the same thing myself. When I was young (early 20’s) I smoked pot and took pyschedelic drugs. It was strictly occassional recreational use. However, I have wondered if there was any lasting effect from LSD or psilocybin. Based on my age and emotional state now, I’d say ‘no.’
However, I had a stepson once who started taking drugs at the age of 12. Mostly pot, but also psychedelics and X. The boy just plain got “weird.” Even after he stopped for quite some he still acted simliarly to how he did when stoned or tripping. Now, whether or not this was strictly emotional/behavioral and not neurophysiological, I don’t know. I always wondered if someone that young began using those types of drugs when their brains aren’t yet fully developed if there would be a permanent alteration to the brain’s physiology.
It’s an intersting question and I regret that I can’t offer any tangible answer Davybhoy.