Are most people that turn to alcohol or drugs simply trying to self medicate an underlying problem?

But those risk factors really only talk about overall probabilities of whether young people with certain characteristics might be more or less prone to using drugs. Knowing about these risk factors can help keep a parent alert, but no set of risk factors determines that a particular child will use drugs, and many kids who have many of those risk factors don’t even try drugs. So parents really have to deal with the individual child’s situation and state of mind.

Research on the pathways to drug use and addiction suggests the immediate decision to use drugs is driven, basically, by one of two types of reasons. One group of young people seems to use drugs simply to feel good. They are seeking novelty or excitement, to have a good time.

These kids are the ones most likely to be responsive to prevention programming that educates about the harmful effects of drugs on their bodies, and are most influenced by the powerful protective factor of having strong and loving parents interested and involved in all aspects of their lives. These kids also seem to have the best chances of being successfully taught to seek alternative ways of having fun and to resist the temptation to seek novelty in drugs and other harmful ways. But there is also a second, very different group of young people who are using drugs for quite different, actually more intractable reasons.

These are kids who in some way or another are suffering and use drugs to try to make themselves feel better, or even normal. This group often includes people stuck in very difficult life situations - poverty or abusive families, for example. It also includes kids suffering from a variety of untreated mental disorders, like clinical depression, manic-depressive illness, panic disorders, schizophrenia.

Estimates are that as many as 10 million children and adolescents may suffer from emotional and psychiatric problems of such magnitude that their ability to function is compromised, and the majority of those kids are at extremely high risk of becoming addicted to drugs. These young people are not using drugs just to feel good. These children are actually trying to medicate themselves with drugs.

They use drugs because they think they will make them feel better, or normal, in the same way that other people might be given anti-depressants or anti-anxiety medications. The problem, of course, is that using illicit drugs is not an effective treatment. In addition to other, perhaps more obvious problems - like that their use interferes with normal functioning - this kind of drug use actually will ultimately make them feel worse, not better.

Medical research has shown clearly that this kind of drug use only exacerbates underlying psychological problems. Both the preventive and the treatment approaches for these “self-medicating” young people need to be quite different from the approaches one would use with novelty seekers or social users. For example, it can’t be very meaningful to warn people who feel terrible today that using drugs may alter their brains a month from now.

Their problem is getting through today. And encouragement to seealternative sources of fun or to seek nicer friends doesn’t seem very meaningful for them either. Again, they are trying to get through today’s issues.

Even the otherwise powerful protective factor of loving, supportive family involvement in the life of the child is not very effective in these areas. Those young people who are trying to self-medicate must have help with their underlying problems. They need professional treatment.

Whatever the reasons, how do you know if your children are using drugs and What do you do if they are? Telltale sign include recent mood and energy level changes, changes in eating habits, specific signs like redness around the eyes, and changes in social and educational performance. Listen carefully to what your children are telling you about their lives and how they feel.