The Healthy You Is the Better You

Posted on: 20 April 2020

Depression in a person's teen years is not uncommon but can be very devastating. People at these ages often aren't equipped to handle the unique issues that depression may cause. As a result, they may start abusing alcohol and other drugs, believing that this will help to beat their depression. Sadly, they're only likely to get caught in a trap that requires addiction therapy to manage.

Depression And Addiction are Tightly Connected

Teens often experience heavy symptoms of depression because their hormone levels are heavily changing in ways that can be unpredictable and hard to tolerate. As a result, they may believe that they "don't belong" with their peers or may end up trying to self-treat their depression in many ways. For example, many teens turn to alcohol or other dangerous substances to calm their depression.

Sadly, all they are doing when drinking or abusing drugs is treating the symptoms and not the underlying disorder. In fact, they are often making their depression worse by putting themselves in an addictive state from which it can seem impossible to escape. As a result of these co-occurring disorders, they fall into a pattern of abuse that often needs drug rehab to manage.

Addiction Treatment May Be Necessary

For teens going through depression and drug addiction, it may be necessary to seriously consider drug rehab, particularly in cases of dual-diagnosis. This care option provides a person with the best chance of overcoming these problems by approaching them from multiple angles. For example, a person's depression will be properly diagnosed within the realms of a person's addiction to assess how it developed.

Critically, the level of the addiction and the ways a person's triggers interact with it may also be managed and gauged during this time. That's because many addiction treatment facilities have detailed psychological and emotional care options that examine a person's inner personality in a deeper and more essential manner. For example, they can use cognitive behavioral therapy to figure out the behaviors that trigger a person to feel depressed and abuse drugs.

And in many addiction treatment centers, it is possible to meet people who can provide a supportive community for an individual affected by drugs. These centers often place people in group therapy sessions that break down the source of a person's depression and addiction and manage them on a deeper level than they can get with any other care option.

For more information, contact an addiction recovery center in your area.