Is Addiction a Disease?
Whenever you ask whether addiction is really a real disease, you have to know what that disease entails. Addiction involves compulsively using drugs or alcohol, despite knowing these iop massachusetts substances hurt you and cause problems in your life. This compulsion happens because your brain has changed in the results of the disease. It is not a personal character flaw or bad judgment.
Is Addiction a Disease?
Not only is addiction a disease, but it's a sophisticated, relapsing, chronic one. It changes your brain structure and chemistry in regions that trigger feelings of reward and motivation. In addition it changes your thought processes, specifically in judgment, learning, and memory. Your body also suffers, as does your loved ones, relationships, work, schooling, and community.
Like other chronic, relapsing diseases, addiction stems from multiple factors. It is due to environmental, biological, and behavioral factors with genetic risks. Actually, your genes contribute about 1 / 2 of the likelihood for you yourself to suffer addiction. A few of the problems caused in your brain within addiction are now actually issues that existed before but hadn't become unmanageable.
There are numerous resources from which to gain the answers to your personal question about “is addiction a disease.” But once you have the disease, you will need help for recovery. This help includes therapy and treatments designed to assist you break the cycles where your brain and body are presently stuck.
Without treatment, your disease is ultimately fatal. It kills you slowly through health conditions or quickly from accident or overdose.
How a Disease of Addiction Changes Your Brain
Addiction changes your brain chemistry and structure, as said before. Chemically speaking, addictive substances cause your brain to release extra chemicals associated with feelings of reward and pleasure. The continued release of those chemicals then affect the structures and systems linked to reward, memory, and motivation.
Once these physical changes take place, you will need your drugs or alcohol just to feel normal. So long as feel satisfied or happy without using. This leads you to keep using, despite knowing about dangerous consequences. That is also why you stop doing things you once loved, to find and abuse alcohol or drugs.
These brain changes are semi-permanent or even permanent, even beyond quitting your substance abuse. The changes make it hard for you yourself to resist going back once again to your drinking or drugs, even when you achieve recovery. That is why you need to learn new skills and ways of interpreting and reacting to your thoughts, feelings, and urges. You need to figure out how to resist triggers that increase your odds of relapse.
Treatment Gives You Expect a Better Future
Although you face an arduous road, as anyone does after addiction, you are able to live a happier, healthier life in recovery. You only need the right therapies, programs, and treatments to get at that place of sobriety and relapse prevention. These therapies and programs include:
Medical detox
Inpatient rehab, IOP, and day treatment
Extended care program
Dual diagnosis treatment
In your addiction recovery, you are not alone. At Washburn House in Worcester, Massachusetts, getting better together is really a way of life. Simply stop wondering, “Is addiction a disease?” Start having the help you will need for that disease and to lead living you truly want.
