drug use to drug abuse
Drug Use to Drug Abuse Drug use becomes drug abuse in my opinion when it starts to effect any of the seven dimensions of wellness. The seven dimensions of wellness are emotional, intellectual, social, occupational, spiritual, environmental, and physical. Drugs effect emotional wellness by increasing your stress level creating the fight or flight response in the brain to react more. This can happen while you are under the influence of a drug and your stress level elevates due to worrying if while driving a car you will be pulled over by a police officer. Being paranoid is another way that drugs can effect emotional wellness. Drugs effect your physical wellness in many ways. They can cause you not to sleep or eat properly. This then causes you to have problems medically which turns into either doctor appointments or needing to have a surgery (organ transplant) due to your body parts shutting down from use or abuse of drugs. My son knows this first hand. He was prescribed a medication for his anxiety and used it for awhile as prescribed, then began taking more then what a normal dose was and more often than needed because he liked the feeling he got from it. While doing this he did not sleep at night which cause him to walk the streets. That led to being bored so he looked for things to do. These things he did were not good things, but he did not care at the time because he was feeling great from the drugs and he was sleep deprived. He continued on this path of using more than the prescribed dose and ended up overdosing. He did this because he felt that being dead would be better than having to face the reality that he was addicted to the drug, and having to go to rehab. Luckily he survived, but the bad things he did while under the influence of the drug caught up to him. He is now serving 2 to 8 years in a correctional facility at the age of only 19. I have also had drug use in my own life turn into abuse and it cost me my job. I used to