How Alcohol and Drug Affect Depression

How Alcohol and Drug Affect Depression

If you are depressed you don’t feel good. You may tend to self medicate using drugs or alcohol or both. Alcohol can be a strong anti depressant at first but then when the use continues, alcohol becomes a depressant. Alcohol is like many other drugs that act on the brain. If you drink it regularly, you find that it has less effect on you. You need to drink more and more to get the effect you want. This is called ‘tolerance’ and is a powerful part of the problem you can develop using alcohol to deal with depression.  It is so easy to get alcohol- you don’t need to talk to a doctor or get a prescription- that it is the drug of choice to deal with depression more often then not. The problem is, alcohol can really make the depression worse. It definitely interferes with your ability to deal with the problems which caused your depression in the first place. Many people who have trouble sleeping start using alcohol as a sleeping pill and it causes no end of problems. In the end, alcohol abuse will really interfere with sleep.

In low doses, alcohol makes you feel relaxed and more able to talk to and be around people if you are shy or lack confidence. Taking small amounts of alcohol, especially red wine seem to be good for our hearts. But there is a big difference between drinking a glass of wine and downing a six pack to back off the pressure.

Even a few drinks can be a depressant for you. Some of the effects are:

-Impaired judgment and decision making

-Vision disturbance, especially peripheral vision

-Less coordination

-Problems with depth perception

-Slower reaction time

-Sleepiness

-At moderate-to-high doses, alcohol also causes:

-Feelings of sadness and despair

-Impaired coordination

-Impaired perception

-Slower reaction time

-Sleepiness to the point of dropping off

And here are health problems you stir up with over alcohol use:

-It can lead to obesity

-It can cause kidney and liver problems

-It is involved in one half of suicides

-It plays a role in many auto accidents

-It is often a part of domestic violence

-It is often a part of assaults and homicides

-It can allow unacceptable behavior

-It can become an addiction

-It can ruin relationships and families

-It can cost your job

As you can see, I am really suggesting to you that alcohol is not the way to deal with your depression.  Alcohol is cheap and easy to get and you don’t have to talk over your problems with someone to get it.  But it can and will cause you to become more depressed if you are using it to treat yourself.

The same can be said for abuse of street drugs.  If you use cocaine or heroin or amphetamines to solve your emotional pain, your pain will only get worse and then you will have not only problems with depression but also problems with addiction.