It is very easy and tempting to turn to drugs and addictive behaviours when anxiety and depressive symptoms come knocking at your door. These momentary pleasures will do the magic of making you forget your struggles for a brief moment. But once their effects wear off, you will need even more doses to produce the same effects they had on you yesterday. And before you realize it, you are dosing large amounts of these drugs becasue the little amounts can no longer produce the irie effects and guess what, you are gradually becoming an addict.

But the story doesn’t end there. You abusing these drugs doesn’t take away your root problems, they just shadow it and the day you try to stay sober, thinking everything is fine BOOM!!!! everything is in your face. Your symptoms are even worse than you remember and on top of it, you are an addict. WOW!, what a cool way to try to treat depression.

Although it is very common to find depression and addiction coexisting in depressive individuals, it is quite hard to determine which condition precedes the other. However, it is clear that depression and substance abuse feed on each other. The presence of either condition makes the other even worse. R.E Meyer in an effort to describe the relationship between these two proposed: Depression may be the cause or result of substance abuse; Depression may alter or worsen substance abuse; Depression may coexist with substance abuse without affecting it, or Depression and substance abuse may be two symptoms of a single problem.

In the end, even if depression made a person prone to addiction, it is important to remember that, curing just the depression won’t necessarily put an end to the addiction. Once a depressed person has addiction problems, he or she has two problems to deal with and as such treatment should be targeted at both issues.