How Alcohol Causes Depression

[bluidkiti]

How Alcohol Causes Depression

It has been proven that alcohol causes depression. Depression is ongoing feelings of hopelessness, sadness, unhappiness, and causes a bleak outlook on life. And when you are suffering from depression you can't be at the top of your game. It is hard to function in high gear when you are fatigued and are experiencing a general lack of interest, also caused by depression. It may also be important to point out here that depression causes anxiety. So many who suffer from depression will also have episodes of anxiety.

Since alcohol is a known depressant, it stands to reason people with depression shouldn't drink. This applies to people suffering from manic depression as well. Studies have shown that doctors miss diagnosing correctly roughly 65% of people who are depressed.

The depression caused by alcohol actually starts with your physical body. First, alcohol lowers the serotonin and norepinephrine levels in your brain. These chemicals are the chemicals that give you your good feelings - a feeling of well being, and they help you to feel normal. The anti-depressant drugs were designed build these chemicals back up. After a long drinking career, since alcohol can take these brain chemicals down to ground zero, it can take a long time for the anti-depressants to bring these brain chemical levels back to where they need to be.

Alcohol also temporarily nullifies the effects of stress hormones. This is why after drinking you feel worse than ever, because alcohol depresses your nervous system and your brain. A study was done that followed people who were only drinking one drink a day and after these people stopped drinking for 3 months, their depression scores improved. And that is only at one drink a day, so it is easy to imagine the impact the kind of volume an alcoholic takes in every day can have.

Alcohol all but wipes out every vitamin in your system after a drinking session. A folic acid deficiency will contribute the brain aging and in older people, dementia. The folic acid deficiency also contributes to overall depression. Further, the alcohol in your system also breaks down and speeds the elimination of antioxidants in your blood. Antioxidants are critically important to our health because antioxidants fight free radicals and free radical damage causes diseases and aging. Our immune system actually creates the antioxidants which then neutralize the free radicals.

Alcohol can activate a gene that has been linked to depression and other mental issues. The result of this activation can cause not only depression, but seizures, and manic depressive episodes as well.

Although the majority of problem drinkers associate depression with their mental and emotional states, the fact is this kind of depression originates in your physical body's response to drinking alcohol.

http://ezinearticles.com/?How-Alcoho...ion&id=1294741

[paul14]

this thread is very useful . Because alcohol do harmful for our brain.

[honeydumplin]

As a child I can remember being overly sensitive to criticism, crying for no apparent reason, and not taking anything seriously. I wanted to fit in. When the little group that I thought was cool wouldn't accept me, like a lot of other teenage boys, I would get mad at my parents, and think that they were responsible for my not being accepted by my peers. As mischevious as I was,they were more than likely making decisions that were in my best interest, but I didn't know that.

We would in fact have co-ed parties at a very young age,and to this I was no exception. Needless to say, the hormones were raging, and usually there was some liquor around that had been from the parents in some form.

My father drank I.W. Harper then. He kept a bottle of it in a brown paper bag out in his shop in an old Coca-Cola machine that served as a makeshift refrigerator. Me and my buddies would sneak out there and wet our whistles between these adolescent games like spin the bottle, and seven minutes in heaven.

As youths, we didn't usually drink much, but then again, it usually didn't take much. Small sips of bourbon would make us feel cool, and we really liked that. To say that I was spoiled would be an understatement. One day at a family picnic, while standing knee high to one of my many uncles at an open car trunk, I watched as he fixed a drink and in one fell swoop turned up a plastic cup. Down the hatch it went, and when he brought the cup away from his mouth there was no ice or anything left at all. The only thing that crossed my mind was, that I really wanted to drink like that.

All the fancy bottles and seductive ads with lit cigarette and a juke box honky tonk in the background makes cocktail hour and a night on the town seem so glamorous. For some who can afford such a luxury, it may in fact be all that. Not for alcoholics. Alcoholics get to see the after effects of the love affair turned obsession turned addiction part where things start to wither away, including our mind and our soul. The advertisements fail to show drunks getting kicked out of the house, and everything they've got floating slowly away.

There's isn't anything romantic about alcoholism. But as far as A.A. Goes, stay thirsty my friend.

[MajestyJo]

Thank you both for sharing. Alcohol is a depressant. It worked for me too. Then it stopped, my best friend became my sworn enemy. More was not enough, and I looked to other things. Recovery is about going in and looking at what caused the depression, and working on the hurts and pain that caused us to look outside of ourselves for that almighty fix to take it all away.

I had to get to the root causes, deal with my feelings, go to meetings, later counselling (sexual assault, divorce, mental and emotional abuse and all the emotions that went along with it. I had to stay clean and sober, so that I could get to the reality of the situation.

The program works if we work it. We have to be willing. Willing to go to any length to maintain our sobriety (soundness of mind). My father was an alcoholic, my mother used food, I was married twice, one who had sexual issues and the second was an alcoholic. My son is in active addiction. He will use anything that is available. When I take on other people's issues, I become depressed. If I don't let go and allow my issues to heal, I stay depressed.