Three Things About Addiction That Feed Your Depression

Depression and drug addiction may not seem all that similar at first.  However, there are many aspects of drug addiction that can easily feed a  person’s depression.  Once the snowball gets rolling, it may be time to turn to drug rehab.  Read on to learn more about the connection between drug addiction and depression.

Drug Addiction And Depression

Relentless Negativity With Drug Addiction

The addicted mind is a negative mind.  Happiness is a short lived  and tough to find.  Your days are occupied by chasing the ever elusive high, and even that eventually disappears.  Your daily drug use becomes an all-out pursuit of just feeling normal.

It’s easy to see how depression can thrive in an environment like this.  Addiction provides fertile ground for depression to grow.  Alcoholics and drug addicts often use chemical to deal with their feelings.  Here’s the cruel trick — emotions that are covered up grow much bigger than those faced with honesty.  It’s like piling fertilizer on top of sprouting seeds.

Drug Addiction and Extreme Thinking

A person who develops a drug addiction has some form of black-and-white thinking.  If things don’t go certain way, disappointment comes along quickly.  Life is either great or terrible.  This perfectionism and all or nothing attitude makes everyday life seem disheartening.  Or, life is so bad that even a few good things here and there are discounted.  When drinking and drug use take you in the complete opposite direction, you eventually lose the middle ground.

It takes more than just extreme thinking to develop depression.  However, most people who think like this don’t ere on the side of positivity.  Life is colored with many shades of gray, not so much black-and-white.  When a person loses sight of this, they can develop despair, hopelessness, and a lack of motivation for life.  That is depression in a nutshell.

Emotions Are Out of Control

Ever spend a little time with someone who really drunk or high?  Pretty good chance they laughed harder than usual and got upset more quickly than usual.  And for many, that affect you will point of using or drinking.  People feel like they can be more expressive with their emotions and have more fun.  But for an alcoholic or drug addict, emotions get unleashed and unmanaged nearly all the time.

Depression is an extreme form of the emotion “sadness”.  You can feel sad about a natural disaster in a foreign country.  You can feel sad about a house fire killing someone you know.  Depression takes the emotion many steps further and applies it absolutely everything.  Much like drug addiction,  depression dismantles a person’s emotional controls.

Dual Diagnosis Drug Rehab

You just learn three ways that addiction and depression can feed off each other.  The only reliable way to get out of this snarled web is with dual diagnosis drug rehab.  It’s common for a person with one or both disorders to deny that they need any help.  However, this would be much like trying to walk out of a quicksand pit.  The more you struggle on your own, the more you sink.  Your best chance lies with someone throwing you a rope.  Drug rehab can be that rope for someone with addiction and depression.