Brain Damage Due To Drug Use

Marijuana's Effects on the Brain

Adolescence is a stressful time, with hormones, acne and the pressure to fit in. Many parents resign themselves to the fact that their teens will likely experiment with cigarettes, alcohol and marijuana.

But Juanita, a single mother of three, didn’t know what to do when her daughter started using it every day---and growing it in her room. More than 40 percent of teens try pot while they’re still in high school, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) .

Juanita called a drug crisis hotline for advice.

"They said, ‘You have to be patient and try to talk to your children,’" she remembers. “The conversations we had were something like this: ‘It’s not good for you and it’s illegal.’ No comment from her."

In hindsight, Juanita realized that the pot-smoking was her daughter’s way of coping with depression, anger and feelings of abandonment. It took more than a decade for her daughter to stop using drugs to cope.

Ed Rusnak is a recovered marijuana addict. Now he runs the family program at Cottonwood de Tucson , one of the leading substance abuse treatment facilities in the country.

The first time he tried pot, he was 18 and a freshman in college. He didn’t like the effects at first, but he liked feeling like he fit in. Soon, he was smoking every day. He dropped out of college and became depressed and paranoid. Eight years later, suicidal thoughts propelled him into a recovery program.

NIDA estimates that 4.3 million Americans ages 12 and older meet the criteria for marijuana abuse or addiction. And 62 percent of teens in drug treatment programs are dependent on marijuana, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. But there are a surprising number of people who say marijuana isn’t addictive.

“There clearly are a lot of people who can smoke pot on a recreational basis and not have it have a huge negative impact on their lives,” says Robert Johnson, medical director of Sierra Tucson , a world-renowned psychiatric hospital that treats addictions. “But some do become dependent on it.

Dependence is a behavioral disorder about developing a lifestyle that’s about finding and using a substance, despite mounting negative consequences.”

Some of Johnson’s colleagues say addiction and dependence are not the same thing. Addiction involves physical dependence. For example, a heroin user will experience agonizing withdrawal symptoms – vomiting, seizures, violent mood swings - if he or she stops using the drug. Pot isn’t physically addictive, so a long-time pot smoker who goes cold turkey might only experience insomnia, anxiety and fidgetiness. But Johnson says his patients who are trying to kick their marijuana habit think of themselves as addicts.

Symptoms of Motor and Volitional Disorders

Holistic changes in volitional activity seen in hyperbulia, hypobulia, parabulia and abulia, but some changes in the areas are described by instinct, depending on the type of instinct.

Under hyperbulia is understood preoccupation drive, which is motivated by the increased attraction, which manifests itself in activity and disinhibition of instincts. This condition is a characteristic of mania.

For hypobulia tend, by contrast, decreased motivation, desires and drives, and also reduced motor activity. Subjectively, patients reported a decrease in activity and lack of interest in all manifestations of life (anhedonia), an internal interpretation of the state corresponds to a loss of energy, so this condition is called a reduction of energy potential.

In abuliaare absent all desires and impulses, even to feed the patient, it requires volitional efforts of others. At the questions he answers briefly and tersely, facial expression has no vitality. He usually is not interested in anything, he spends all his time in bed. Abulia occurs in schizophrenic defect. This state is close to the vegetative coma, the patient being in bed, carries all the physiological functions without supervision, he eats only food offered by the tutelary face and refuses to speech activity. Vegetative coma is the end stage of dementia.

Increasing food instinct – bulimia is accompanied by voracity, the patients eat a lot, but often do not get better. This is typical to endocrine disease and dementia. Reducing food instinct – anorexia, is expressed in the refusal to eat or to the election of monotonous food. For example, a patient may be on a diet of only apples or only of bread. Anorexia is observed with endocrine diseases and dissociative disorders, as well as depression. In psychopathology is also found eating of the inedible – coprophagy, such as patients with mental retardation can eat small stones, clay and drink urine.

Improving the sexual instinct in men is called as satiriasis, women as nymphomania. They are characterized by frequent promiscuous sexual relations with a natural for these states increased risk of venereal disease. Tend to mania, episodes of substance abuse, organic brain damage. Reducing the sexual instinct is referred to as impotence in men and frigidity in women. More details about these symptoms can be found in the relevant chapters of the textbook, for that matter, and on the distortion of sexual desire – paraphilia. A controversial issue is the allocation of paraphilia of homosexuality. The fact is that the risk of homoeroticism is about 10% of men and women. This fact and also the association of homoeroticism with regulatory sexuality puberty led to the recognition of homosexuality as a norm and its exclusion from the ICD-10.

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