COUN 502/ Essay 3
Introduction: Throughout this essay, I will explain the relationship between abuse and addiction in adolescence. How it affects the developing brain and how a healthy spiritual development can counter act the effects on adolescence. I will also report substance abuse statistics that are currently reported for the State of Nevada. Let’s first identify how the brain develops. As we have read over the past weeks that brain primarily develops in utero. Once born the infants continues to develop by experiences. The experiences create additional neural activity and continue throughout development. We also learned about neural pruning and the “use it or lose it” concept (Feldman, 2014). In adolescence the brain continues to develop significantly in the pre-frontal cortex which is responsible for problem solving, impulse management and identifying …show more content…
However, according to the Carson City Health Assessment of 2012, binge drinking was 16.1 % in 2009 compared to the overall rate of 17.5% for the remainder of the state, which includes Las Vegas. Furthermore it indicated that the overall death rate (drug caused) in the state of Nevada to be “16.5 out of 100,000” with Carson City being 16.4% which is extremely problematic. To put it perspective the population of Las Vegas is 595,424 in 2012 and Carson City is 54,838 in 2012. Additionally, where you can obtain free alcohol ( as an adult) in casinos makes this particular troublesome. Conclusion: In this essay I explained the relationship between abuse and addiction in adolescence. I addressed how it affects the developing brain and how a healthy spiritual development can counter act the effects on adolescence. I also reported the staggering statistics that are currently reported for the State of