Introduction to Mood Disorders | Addiction and Mental Health Counseling Recovery Activities

Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Addiction and co Occurring Disorders treatment manual. Today we're talking about unit one, Part two, an Introduction to Mood disorders. Unit one, part one was an Introduction to Addiction. So now we're going to move on to mood disorders. I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. In this part, we're going to define mood disorders and explore how they may interact with physical health and addiction issues. Mood issues include emotions like anxiety, depression, anger, grief, mania, guilt, and can cause or worsen other mental health issues or addictive behaviors. So think about it. Maybe you have a lot of anxiety. When you're anxious for too long, you can start feeling run down and feeling hopeless and helpless and depressed. Or when you're anxious, you may be more irritable and more likely to lash out with anger. And then when you lash out with anger, you may feel guilty for it. So emotions can trigger other emotions. Unfortunately, negative emotions or unpleasant emotions typically trigger other unpleasant emotions. So you're just adding to that soup of what we call dysphoria or feeling, unfortunately, unhappy. How have mood issues contributed to the development of addictive behaviors? If you have any, how have you used different behaviors to escape from your, your negative feeling states, your unpleasant feeling states? Addictive behaviors alter brain chemicals. Remember we talked in the last part about dopamine and endorphins? Addictive behaviors alter brain chemicals which can trigger depression, anxiety, mania, or other mood or mental health issues, including things like schizophrenia. That's rare, but it can happen. It's important to recognize that when you start altering dopamine and endorphins and serotonin, it also affects all of the other neurochemicals and can worsen the mood issues. Think about the person who uses. We'll just go big cocaine. Cocaine is a stimulant. They may feel happier when they're using cocaine because they are triggering all of their excitatory neurochemicals, their, their happy neurochemicals. But then when the cocaine leaves their system to be, you know, over. To oversimplify it, when the cocaine leaves their system, they don't have enough of those happy chemicals anymore. So then they end up feeling depressed and hopeless and potentially angry. The way people respond to different drugs or different addictive behaviors is usually pretty similar. And the detox from any particular drug or behavior is usually the opposite of the intoxication. So when you're using, if you feel euphoric, if you feel super happy, then when you're detoxing, you're probably going to feel exhausted and depressed and guilt ridden. When you are engaging in behaviors that help you relax in some way, then when you're not engaging in those behaviors or using those drugs, then you're probably going to feel more anxious and angry. What you're seeing is the switch in neurochemicals. Mood disorders alter your brain chemistry as well, so you may try to self medicate with addictive behaviors. When you're feeling depressed, you may try to self medicate by consuming drugs or engaging in behaviors that increase those excitatory neurochemicals. It's important to treat all physical, psychological and addictive issues at the same time. Now, you're not going to treat every single thing at the same time. However, it's important to recognize if you are struggling with, for example, post traumatic stress, depression, addiction and autoimmune issues, all of those things interact. So it's going to be important to pay attention at the very least to all four of those things. If not, begin addressing in some way, shape or form all four of those things. A sober person with raging anxiety is going to have difficulty staying sober. And a person who has recovered from depression or anxiety, but continues to use quote recreationally is still altering those neurochemicals, which will likely lead to a relapse of their mental health issues as well as any physical or inflammatory issues they may have. So spend about 50 minutes thinking back over the past few years, over your history. In what ways has depression, guilt, anxiety, anger or resentment triggered addictive behaviors? And it's important to list each one of those emotions and think about how each one has triggered each other. One that you'll kind of have a matrix but recognizing when people feel depressed, for example, they don't have much energy. They feel helpless and hopeless. So they often don't engage with others the way they want to. They feel guilty because they don't have the motivation, the energy, the wherewithal to get up and go to their kids soccer game or go to work or whatever it is. So thinking about how each one of those things, each one of those feelings may have triggered addictive behaviors, and then thinking about ways in which addictive behaviors or mood issues have triggered depression, guilt, anxiety, anger or resentment.