When you feel down, it’s natural to desire a release.
Alcohol is a depressant, but statistically, those diagnosed with depression tend to drink more. Why? The answer is pretty simple: alcohol is a brief, albeit effective up-lifter. It works, if only momentarily. But, as they say, when you’re up, eventually, there’s no place to go but down (that adage couldn’t be more appropriate for co-morbidity). And once you’ve learned how to use alcohol as a self-medicating technique, your depression will only worsen, as the depressive effects of alcohol will cause your mental illness to worsen as well, as one feeds into the other.
The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry reports that one out of three adults in the midst of a substance use disorder problem also suffers from depression. And conversely, if you suffer from depression, you are more likely to abuse alcohol. Those diagnosed with anxiety or depression are twice, or three times as likely to develop a substance use disorder disorder, in comparison to the rest of the American population, as affirmed by the Anxiety and Depression Association of America.
When you drink alcohol, it promotes a type of “jump-start” to your metabolism: alcohol must be immediately metabolized before other forms of sustenance, which is what gets you tipsy. But what accompanies this, other than the usual symptoms of dehydration, loss of bodily control, euphoria, and other symptoms, alcohol also spikes up dopamine levels in the brain’s reward center, the general region of the brain that produces positive thought patterns but also shifts the brain chemicals that augment depression, even as dopamine levels continue to be released through alcohol consumption.
It’s time we discussed the co-occurrence of mental (and physical) illness and alcoholism on a regular basis. It would seem that the more research and studies are completed regarding alcohol, the more we discover about how certain illnesses put you at a greater risk for developing a misuse disorder. And the variety of those illnesses and symptoms expands all the time, too.
Depression and alcoholism treatment no longer exist as two separate entities. Luckily, in the past decade or so, the process of treating co-morbid illnesses such as depression and alcoholism has shifted in perspective: it has become common practice to treat the two illnesses concurrently, rather than as two separate steps in the process. The more we find out about substances’ effect on the brain, the better solutions we can find to treat co-morbid illnesses like substance use disorder and depression.
