Alcohol and Drug Abuse in Teens: Effects
How is a person’s degree of alcoholism determined? There are three different stages of alcoholic behaviors generally used to gauge the severity of an individual’s problem. These include:
- Early: An early alcoholic uses booze as a crutch, or coping device, to deal with pressure or as an escape from day-to-day problems. Early alcoholics may promise to quit drinking but do not, or cannot, as their bodies begin to require more and more alcohol to achieve the same “buzz.”
- Middle: Middle-stage alcoholics can’t get through a day without drinking. Physically, they may suffer from irregular heartbeats, the “shakes”, irritability, and insomnia resulting from their drinking. Emotionally speaking, middle stage alcoholics will deny that they have drinking problems. They will begin to manipulate and lie to others as their drinking habits become more secretive. It gets increasingly more difficult to achieve and/or maintain a “buzz.”
- Late: Any individual who has progressed to late-stage alcoholism is quite sick indeed, both emotionally/mentally and physically. Their bodies are affected by conditions such as malnutrition, nerve dysfunction, memory loss, mental confusion, hypertension, heart disease, and cirrhosis of the liver, to name a few. “Reverse tolerance” may also occur, in which the brain and liver can no longer tolerate the consumption of even small amounts of alcohol. Late-stage alcoholics live to drink and get drunk and have usually distanced themselves from friends and/or family members whom they no longer trust.
