Addiction: Types and Strategies for Prevention

Addiction is the continued repetition of a behavior despite of the adverse consequences i.e., Physiological and Psychological addiction. The signs of addiction are Obsession, Loss of control, Negative consequences and Denial. Three major types of addiction are smoking, drugs, alcohol and Process addictions in which behaviors are known to be addictive because they are mood altering i.e., Money addictions, compulsive gambling, and Work addiction. The facts about the smoking are each cigarette reduces 11 min of life, alcohol causes fatal lung, throat and mouth cancer and increases the risk of stroke and heart attack frequency.

Drug abuse iimages a severe public health problem that affects almost every community and family. It can lead to homelessness and crime and it also harms unborn babies. Alcohol is the world’s oldest known drug. The consumption and abuse of alcohol is the major public health problem. The path of alcohol by the body is alcohol enters through the mouth and then in to stomach in which it enters the bloodstream through the walls of the small intestine thereby heart which pumps the alcohol throughout the body.

Substance abuse prevention falls under three levels of intervention i.e., primary, secondary and tertiary intervention. The primary prevention focuses on the populations that had only minimal or no exposure to drugs. Secondary prevention focuses on populations whose drug experience has not been related with serious long-term problems where as in Tertiary prevention focuses on populations who are in treatment i.e., goal to prevent relapse.

The overall strategy for substance-abuse prevention is to minimize the risk factors in a person’s life about drug-taking behavior and to maximize the protecting factors. The inclination to resist the effects of risk factors for drug-taking behavior through the action of protective factors is referred as resilience.

Journal of Addiction & Prevention

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