Adolescents and Drug Addiction

Adolescence is the stage with the highest risk of initiating substance use. However, this fact, ignored until relatively few years ago by scientific research, remains today a little explored field.

During adolescence, many changes occur in a torrential manner. The adolescent abandons the concrete thinking of the child and begins to develop the abstract and flexible thinking of the adult. He undergoes enormous changes in his anatomy and physiology. But his major crossroads is the ambivalence he feels between prolonging his childhood and obeying the imperative to leave behind the needs of infantile dependency. That is, in his difficulty in opting for an adult identity, his own and independent.

The adolescent struggles against his parents and other authority figures because he projects his own dependency needs onto them. He chooses to think that they want him to remain a small child, because he cannot accept that he is the one who really fears the consequences of ceasing to be a child. This generates an alternation between attacks and states of subjection in front of the parents. Usually the parents show perplexity and react with hostility to such attacks which helps to contaminate the relationship with their child and closes a circle of irrationality that harms both. It is not easy to see that such attacks are nothing more than an external representation of the adolescent’s internal conflicts.

Adolescence is an emotionally chaotic stage in which the subject needs to carry out a profound reorientation of his inner self and of his interpersonal relationship patterns without having, on the other hand, a clear model. That is why he uses the trial-and-error method and seeks new identifications and indestructible alliances with his peers that validate his choices and changes and provide him, at the same time, with feelings of invulnerability and omnipotence that allow him to hide his terrible fragility and insecurity from his conscience. This is what causes him to engage in behaviors and constantly seek new sensations without adequately assessing the risks he incurs.

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It should be noted that the high incidence of several psychiatric disorders (affective disorders with suicidal ideation, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety disorders and conduct disorders essentially) is found in adolescents who abuse or are dependent on intoxicants. All the changes experienced at this stage of life increase vulnerability to stress, frustration and anxiety. These facts promote the use of substances as randomly tested self-medications but finally selected by their emotional experience. Thus, after testing the effect of different intoxicants, the phobic will probably opt for alcohol, the anxious for cannabis, the depressive or hyperactive for psychostimulants or the aggressive or passive dependent for opiates.

It is evident that the use of these substances distances the adolescent from the real resolution of his or her conflict, promotes school failure, causes personal derailment and introduces him or her into marginalization circuits that eventually lead to delinquency.

With adolescents we must strive to understand what is behind the apparent problem they present and formulate a solution that is adjusted and comprehensive to the real underlying problem. It is not enough to label the adolescent consumer with a code and apply a standard treatment. The stakes are too high and the time we have to act is too short. Once behavior becomes entrenched, it is much more difficult to promote change.

A timely intervention can redirect a wrong trajectory and prevent the destruction of the future life of the adolescent and his or her family. On the contrary, a mistake or a delay in treatment can have catastrophic consequences.