Treating Heroin Addiction in Adolescents

Posted by thomenda7xx on Thursday, January 3, 2013

Adolescents, in particular, are vulnerable to addiction because their brains are still in development and are not fully formed. This means they are still malleable, and therefore are able to be influenced physically by chemical compounds. This can have far reaching consequences for them, as it may ultimately affect how they finish maturing into adults. Too heavy of drug use during this period can effectively cripple a teenager for life.

One of the worst drugs a teenager can become involved with is Heroin. This is for a variety of reasons, but perhaps the biggest is the fact of how addictive it is. There have been instance of a teenager developing a physical addiction to the drug after using it only a single time. This makes the drug extremely scary for parents for obvious reasons.

Another thing to keep in mind about heroin is the withdrawal symptoms. These can be acute and very painful. Sometimes the person who has the addiction is going to need to do a lot of vomiting for instance. Other times they will experience other symptoms of varying degrees of unpleasantness. These can range from the mild such as problems with your sleeping cycle, to the more severe, such as extreme physical or muscular pain that can result when a person is going through withdrawals.

There are a variety of ways that you can treat addiction, but they all have one main feature in common. The best thing to do is to make absolutely sure that you are getting all traces of a drug out of a person. That way, you know that you are really only dealing with residual physical dependency issues. This in turn makes it easier to isolate the mental problems the teenager may be dealing with so you can treat those as well.

Other things to keep in mind can include the fact that it is very easy to relapse into past behaviors. Most addicts experience a relapse at least once into their old drug using behaviors. This means that not only must these individuals constantly get the actual treatment they need, but also that they must be watched to make sure they are not interrupting the treatment plan.

It is most difficult to treat adolescents because of their age. Everyone feels bad for these children and they need to get the help they need to shake off their addiction and drug use issues. The time to do this is while they are still young, because they really need to have these sorts of problems sorted out by the time they become adults. Treating Heroin Addiction in adolescents is a very important function to perform.

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