Drugs are psychoactive substances that are likely to induce psychological effects successively, as a strengthening of the performance of a state of mental or physical dependence. The drug creates physical, psychic addiction and severe mental, perceptual and behavioral disorders.
Toxicomania is a psychosomatic condition that results from the interaction of the individual with a specific psychoactive product, resulting in behavioral and other reactions that imply a stable, permanent, continuous or periodic desire to consume the drug to obtain specific psychological effects. If drug abuse is suppressed, severe disorders of various forms, degrees, and intensities are triggered.
In order to better understand this concept, we will clarify the meaning of the terms addiction, physical dependence, psychological dependence, drug, tolerance, and withdrawal, through which drug abuse operates. On the site http://www.athomedrugtestkits.net/, you can find kits for testing the drug level in your body.
Thus, addiction is the desire to consume a toxic substance periodically or continuously to obtain from it a pleasure or to dispel a state of indisposition. Psychiatric dependence is the mental state characterized by the patient’s impulse to periodic or continuous drug use to acquire a pleasure or annihilation of tension.
Physical dependence is the adaptive state that results in the occurrence of acute physical disorders when the administration of the substance is stopped or after the neutralization of its action by a specific antagonist. Tolerance is manifested by the need to increase doses to achieve the desired effect progressively.
The occurrence of somatic symptoms characterizes the withdrawal after stopping or reducing a drug that is regularly used.
Psychopathological characteristics of the toxic dependence
Thus, from the above mentioned, the following psychopathological features of the toxic dependence appear:
- the permanent need for continuous or periodic consumption of a natural or synthetic drug, with the tendency to increase the initial dose administered
- physical and psychological dependence
- the inability to stop using drugs
- psychopathological and physiological manifestations occurring in the event of sudden disruption of substance use
- physical, mental, moral and social degradation following long-term use of drugs
Abstinence syndrome is manifested after stopping drug administration for several hours and is an expression of physical dependence through symptoms and signs that may be even dangerous for the patient’s life. Many of them are reversed in response to the drug and are more severe for intense and short-term toxic effects such as heroin. Abstinence syndrome can lead to death. More here.
Causes and risk factors depending on the drug
One element can not determine whether a person will become a consumer or drug addict. The overall risk of dependence is influenced by biogenetic influences, the biological matrix of the individual, and it can even be influenced by gender or ethnicity, its stage of development, psycho-behavioral factors (personality, attitudes, activities) and social / cultural environment, interpersonal school, colleagues, family).
The entrance to drug abuse is through the gate of pain, volition, and worry.Hence the importance of the emotional factor, the moral and socio-cultural aspect of drug use by the community in distress. The most critical factors that cause the individual to consume drugs are:
- curiosity, the quest for new sensations, novelty, attraction exercised by forbidden pleasure, fascination related to the perception of a potential danger
- the antisocial connotation of toxic substance abuse, which gives meaning to a refusal of social values, of the system, escape from a world perceived as hostile
- the naive quest for a new form of communication with other individuals who share the same ideals
- the desperate attempt to resume broken discussion with relatives because of their rigid moral principles
- the drug can offer the temporary illusion of an increase in the intellectual performance of the individual, or the artistic creation capacity
- the need for narcissistic assertion through the satisfaction of the drug effect
- compensating for the difficulty of subjects to tolerate frustrations and related to them, their effective maturity and poor sexuality
- search for a “”
- searching for or repeating the pleasant initial effects
- the cultural norm in some sub-cultures
Check this out: https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugs-brains-behavior-science-addiction/addiction-health
- self-medication for anxiety states, social phobias, insomnia, negative symptoms of mental illness
- to prevent withdrawal symptoms