Effects of Drugs on mental Health – What you should know

The word ‘Drugs’ has gained the status of a misnomer somehow. When anyone mentioned that word, the immediate response is resentment towards the person associated with it and implied shame. In the most common use cases, that word generates the references to the illegal variety like LSD, Ecstasy, Heroine, and illegal marijuana.

However, drugs implicitly refer to pharmaceuticals. Whether these pharmaceuticals are illegal or otherwise is a different problem. Even a pill which is as common as Aspirin can be labeled as a drug. So, when a person says drugs, he or she is not necessarily referring to the illegal variety.

That being said, the problem of overdose can actually apply to all drugs. The side effects, however different in nature, do not discriminate between the legality of the said pharmaceutical. And the worst side effect of them all is the mental kind, wherein the harmful effects are of the psychological kind.

What is drug abuse?

There are some medicines or pharmaceuticals which induce a painkilling effect. Others cause relaxation, while still others are anti-depressants and stimulants. The common thing with these drugs is that all of them take away your pain, physical or mental. These are temporary fixes at best.

But it is hard to determine when these temporary fixes become permanent. They are supposed to take care of the immediate symptoms of the pain or stress. The best-case usage scenario is where these drugs assist in the recovery of a prolonged illness of some kind which causes continuous misery. The side effects are negligible or controllable when taken under the supervision of the medical practitioner who prescribes them.

However, instead of dealing with the problems which lead to the intake of these drugs, the individual starts taking them on a regular basis. Most of the times, that individual is unaware of the mental health issues caused by these drugs, even if they are mentioned on the packaging. Anorexia, aggression, mood swings, hallucinations, paranoia, confusion, violence and complications of existing mental illnesses are just a few atrocities that the overdose of some drugs can inflict on the mind.

Even if the individual is aware of them, he or she will sometimes ignore them to a blatant magnitude to acquire the drugs, at any cost. Why does this happen?

It’s because the pharmaceuticals create a vicious cycle of dependency when they are taken without supervision. So, every time an individual feels stress or pain, he or she takes the relevant drug to rid of that problem. The symptoms subside for the moment, until they appear again, stronger than ever and with a greater immunity to the drugs. This leads to a ‘craving’ or uncontrollable desire to acquire those drugs to the extent where the individual excludes everything else from his or her life. So the individual increases the dose, and this continues ad infinitum.

How to get rid of this abuse?

What the individual does not know is that these drugs can only suppress the symptoms of the pain or stress. They are not meant to treat the illness or the mental health problem which is actually causing these symptoms to exist.

The best way to tackle this problem is to get support. It is very dangerous to deal with this problem alone. No matter how strong the mind or the body, there comes a point in time where both can break. That’s exactly when the addiction attacks because we give in.