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Why are some people addicts and others arent?!?!

ryand123

ryand123

Bluelighter
Joined
Jul 8, 2011
Messages
206
Location
Austin, TX
I am unfortunantly ADDICTED to drugs. My friend on the other hands can pick up drugs and put them down with the greatest of ease. He says "I just don't have an addictive personality". But WHAT IS THE ADDICTIVE PERSONALITY?!?! Why are some people plagued with this disease and others aren't??? Is there a gene in the body that decides whether or not I am gonna be an addict? Or does everybody an addict but just addicted to different things? I think about these things every damn day and i would like somebody to fill me in please!
 
I think that there are some determining factors but it is ultimately your choice to use drugs.

I don't really see people as addicts v non addicts, I just think of it as people who have gone there with it, and those who haven't yet.

I think any one person could easily develop a drug addiction if they are careless about it, so I don't think of addicts as different than non addicts like there's something wrong with it.

It's like being a pilot. If you haven't flown a plane what would you equate to it? Some people become pilots, other's don't.

Drug abuse is present in all societies known to man though so there aren't limitations on who could become an addict.

I think if you were going to separate people you'd look at people who beat drug addiction versus those who haven't (yet) , versus those who aren't users.
 
Captain.Heroin said:
I think that there are some determining factors but it is ultimately your choice to use drugs.
Click to expand...

I agree with this. Some peoples' personalities seem to be fundamentally more compatible with drugs - an anxious person will get tremendous relief from downers, whereas a perhaps socially numb or 'lost'-feeling person will likely get a kick from stimulants. I see with great clarity now that the reason I felt so attracted to opiates was my anxiety and persistent negativity.

I also think that events in peoples' lives play a huge role. Opiates and alcohol are obviously killer for numbing a person out, whereas psychedelics are generally better suited to inquisitive and optimistic natures.

So these things are all factors, but they are conditions rather than positive causes. Nobody is ever compelled to use drugs; it is just more convenient and compatible in some cases than others.
 
The majority of people have their own addictions they are just less blatant than drugs. I would consider it to be more of a human condition rather than something particular to certain people.

There are some personality traits or genes that research shows to be associated with substance use but there's no single cause that explains everything. Even if somebody has a gene that increases likelihood of becoming dependent on drugs, like Captain Heroin said the person needs to experiment with the drugs in the first place or else there's not going to be an addiction. So there always seems to be a combination of factors involved that may vary from person to person.
 
I don't think there is one "thing" that will make a person a drug addict. Life experiences, family history, health, can all influence that initial "push" towards substance abuse.

For me personally I was coping most of my life with undiagnosed PTSD and right temporal lobe epilepsy. When epilepsy comes out of your right temporal lobe it tends to fuck with your emotions and as a result I spent a childhood gripped in terror due to OCD, a panic disorder, Asperger's syndrome(autism) and simple partial seizures, none of which were acknowledged by my parents (you're normal! stop complaining! you're a hypochondriac!) That in turn resulted in borderline personality disorder. I also have ADD which frustrates the hell out of me. The doctors and everyone around me tell me I am highly, highly intelligent which often leaves me bored, frustrated, angry and miserable. There are/were a couple of raging alcoholics on my mother's side of the family. All combined I reached out to and embraced benzos and opiates. Would there have been a different outcome had I seen doctors as a child? Maybe.


edit: now at the age of 29 I am finally on a wonderful combo of medications and happier than I have ever been in my life (actually, I finally AM happy for the first time ever). Now, suddenly, drugs don't interest me anymore.
 
May I ask you what you take for your OCD? I too have severe OCD. I don't really have too many compulsive behaviours ie. cleaning, organization, counting, ect... but I do have severe obsessive and unwanted thoughts that terrify and disgust me at times and i hate it so much...
This is one of the main reasons i use drugs, specifically opiates. I dont have to think and I dont have to care.
 
ryand123 said:
May I ask you what you take for your OCD? I too have severe OCD. I don't really have too many compulsive behaviours ie. cleaning, organization, counting, ect... but I do have severe obsessive and unwanted thoughts that terrify and disgust me at times and i hate it so much...
This is one of the main reasons i use drugs, specifically opiates. I dont have to think and I dont have to care.
Click to expand...


Initially I started using clomipramine which worked great but because it lowers seizure threshold I needed to switch to something else (I have epilepsy) and started Zoloft which works even better for me.
 
ryand123 said:
Do you know if certain OCD meds work better for certain obsessions/compulsions?
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It's more "certain drugs work better for certain people" kinda thing. Start trying a group of drugs (SSRIs for example) and move on to other types if those don't work.
 
Well i have tried SSRI's before and they work for a little while, but eventually they stop working, no matter how much they up my dose they only work for a couple months then i start getting those thoughts again...

What else besides SSRI's is good for combating these thoughts and behaviours? Ill mention them to my psychiatrist

Ive been on combinations of anit-psychotics and SSRI's many times in my life. Ive gone through serouqel and risperdal and SSRI's like Prozac and Lexapro but they only work for so long for me.
 
ryand123 said:
Well i have tried SSRI's before and they work for a little while, but eventually they stop working, no matter how much they up my dose they only work for a couple months then i start getting those thoughts again...

What else besides SSRI's is good for combating these thoughts and behaviours? Ill mention them to my psychiatrist
Click to expand...


Your psychiatrist is going to be a lot more familiar with all of the OCD med possibilities than I am.
 
if you want bill wilson's reasoning you have an obsession of the mind that overpowers you to use drugs/alcohol that in turn causes an allergic reaction within your body making you want more and more. all of that stems from spiritual malady, or the "lack of god" in your life.

sounds hokey and all but if you spend enough time wondering why the fuck you do what you do yet can't stop yourself it begins sounding a little more palatable.
 
Yeah I'm ALL TO FAMILIAR with AA and Bill and Bobs theory that a lack of a Higher Power is the reason behind alcoholism/drug addiction. I just dont know if i believe it or not. I am positive that there is some sort of Higher Force in the world but I don't know if I believe that if I "turn my will and life over to the care of God as I understand Him" that i will get clean. I've been to church a few times in the year or so and it really makes me depressed that the people in there are happy and have such a connection with their God and I'm just completely out of touch. But at the same time as I look around the church I always have a thought or two about the people who do nothing but devote their lives to the church and I wonder if maybe they aren't really loving God, but more worshipping Him in order to avoid "Hell" or "Purgatory"

Sorry i just started ranting i was in the zone and i mightve gotten a little off topic.
 
i remember walking into stores and seeing people in the parking lot pushing a shopping cart or whatever and having nothing but hate for that person because they didn't have problems with addiction. complete strangers. people who i'm sure have their own problems, could be affected by addiction either through someone else's struggles or maybe even their own. to me though, being the self centered addict, it was as simple as us (addicts) and them.

i had the same kind of contempt for people with faith.

i even had the same kind of contempt for people in AA.

what i found out was that as much as i thought i hated those people, i really just wanted to be more like them. i wanted the seemingly "normal" life, the faith that so many people around me found solace in, and the ability to stop using heroin.

i'm far from an AA warrior but it at least allowed me to get enough clarity to finally make changes in my life. i tried everything else.
 
i think addiction is more complex than "choice" ... Why would people choose to use when they know if they do they will loose their family and go to prison? just an example..

i feel like its on the physiological level with the body and brain .. etc
 
That's what i think too.
You would think that a person who lost a parent or friend to addiction would say "no way man I'm not touching those anymore". But yet as addicts we get depressed and use even MORE than we did before that tragedy happened. Or like cire113 said, no regular person would continue to use drugs after they got sent to prison for 10 years on drug charges, but as addicts there is a GOOD chance that we would. I believe part of it is choice, we have the choice to start using them in the first place. But, once an addict puts that drug into his/her system, its ALL OVER. And it's going to have to take actually physically removing the addict from his/her environment and separating the addict from the drugs.
 
physical removal alone still doesn't do much for the mental obsession. i'm just two months removed from the last time i used, live in a different state than before, and the mental battle can be as hard as ever. every night i dream about getting high. in my dreams i will have scored some heroin and then look down and it's all ash (even though i only smoked it a handful of times before i started shooting) but then i'll find a small amount but no points or the cops show up and i have to run. so mornings tend to be the hardest for me, probably also because i never got out of bed in the morning without a shot or at least pills.

it's still not nearly as bad as when i was in withdrawals or even the few weeks after the really bad physical side was over but it's absolutely still there.
 
while there are *clearly* genetic/biological factors that affect this - for instance, a beer may be 20X as satisfying to you as to me, or perhaps one's ability to find joy in *anything* traditional is so low that drugs truly are their best chance at a shred of happiness - I think that addiction says a ton about the 'mental state' of the individual within the confines of that person's psyche. ((there's also something to be said for the psychological rewiring that an addict experiences, and its effects on continuing consumption, but that still comes down to basic reinforcement in the end)).
I have a feeling I'm completely bastardizing the point I'm 'trying to make, so I'll phrase it like this - the correlation between "life sucks" and "addiction" is huge, and while the two clearly feed off of each other to a large degree, that duality is the root of addiction IMO. I know non-addicts who are "temporary addicts" when "life's fucking them over". Most any addict I know uses LESS when life is going good for them, and they almost always use more when life's going poorly.
A fantastic study wrt this topic is "Rat Park", I wish the study got more attn than it did but there's a wiki page for it. In essence, they had a dual-setup for the whole "rats self-administering drugs", one setup was real nice and a great lil home for the rats, and contained both drug-laced and pure liquids. Those rats chose the pure liquids, not the drugs. The other setups were the stereotypical cages where the rat's in a shithole, and can choose either liquid. These rats chose the drug-laced liquids. HOWEVER, once the rats from the shitty-setups were introduced into rat-park (the nice setup), they did NOT continue to seek the drug-laced water that was right there, freely available to them, instead they drank water and went for a "healthy" life in a normal setup. IIRC, some/many even exhibited w/d symptomology(sp? my spell-check's hitting that but fuckin mac isn't offering an alternative..meh), but despite that they still drank the 'pure' solution.
I think this speaks volumes about both individuals' circumstances affecting their "addictive personalities", and of the larger picture of comparisons between "good, productive societies" and "downtrodden ghetto's". Guess it boils down to "addictive personalities" tend to go hand-in-hand with shitty lives/circumstances. From personal experiences and observations, this holds true almost 100% ;P
 
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