Depression Learning

The Shame, Guilt and Depression Associated with Prescription Drug Abuse

Millions of people around the United States have a problem with prescription drugs. As a result of prescription drug abuse, millions of people go through drug rehab in order to get well again. Sometimes it takes several admissions to drug rehabs to get sober again. There is a lot of shame, guilt and depression involved with “not getting it right the first time.” If the self-hatred isn’t enough, the rest of the family is suffering from similar feelings. If you have a prescription drug addiction, you may want to stop, but you don’t know how. You try to stop, but you can’t let go of them.

Marriages often fall apart, because the drugs take first place in the marriage, and the relationship is shoved aside to second or third place. Addiction is a sickness, just like major depression disorder is an illness, and so is drug addiction. You find it impossible to stop taking the drugs, because they are a part of you. That dependency is also changing the chemistry within you. Is it any wonder, people get depressed when they try to quit an addiction? Drug addictions make whole families depressed. Just like when someone is mentally ill, the whole family is affected in some way.

We trust our doctors to give us the treatments and medicines we need to get well. Sometimes when people get dependent on prescription medication they blame the doctor for giving it to them in the first place. The doctor isn’t wrong in giving you a prescription medication, until there if evidence that the patient does have a dependence on the drug. When the patient comes to the doctor frequently for the same drug to be filled and filled again, the doctor should put a stop to it.

When you open the bottle of pain killers for the first time, you have no idea that you would ever get hooked on them. It happens all too often, that the drugs that are prescribed for us to be therapeutic will end up being the source of a never ending cycle of depression and dependence. Each of us rationalizes that it won’t happen to us. We won’t get hooked on pain killers. Before we know it, we are taking those pain killers to sleep with, or we are taking them because we have a headache. Any kind of discomfort, real or imagined is an excuse to take just one more prescription pain medicine.

Do you know someone who is a prescription drug abuser? You might wonder how a person can get enough prescription drugs to supply a drug habit. It’s fairly easy to do; many people do it. An individual needing drugs will go to any length to get them. He/she will steal a prescription pad, if necessary. If you are a prescription drug abuser you might even hop from pharmacy to pharmacy. You might go from doctor to doctor. Sadly, this is the way many people get their stash of prescription drugs. They don’t want to run out of their drug. You might know someone who has a pharmacy in their medicine cabinet. Those drugs might be prescribed from 3 or 4 different doctors. If you were to ask the drug abusers if they felt good about what they do to get their stash of drugs, they likely would tell you they hate doing it. Consider the fear and shame you would feel every minute of the day. People who are doing illegal things to get prescription drugs live on the edge. Shame and depression follows you wherever you go.

People, hooked on prescription drugs, can be just as dependent as those on the illegal street drugs. Many people think that because prescription drugs are regulated by the FDA, that they are safer than the illegal drugs. Used in a non-therapeutic way, prescription drugs are just as harmful as the illegal drugs. In fact, if you are acquiring prescription drugs in an illegal manner, you are just on the edge of getting caught every time. Your voice of reason says your only option is to put an end to the addiction. At first, you won’t want to go into treatment, because you won’t want to be away from the drugs. The drugs become a part of you down to the cellular level. The depression will lift when the addiction loses its hold on you.

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