Mental Health News

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Medical researchers find that for many, the problem of drug addiction and mental illnesses occur together.  It has long been known that people with mental illnesses ranging from anxiety disorders to bipolar depression commonly struggle with addictions.  These can be addictions such as nicotine, alcohol and cocaine or others.  In fact, Andrew Chambers, MD, cited that at least half of all people who seek help for their addictions are also diagnosed with a co-occurring mental health disorder. 

For a long time previously, doctors had assumed that the addictions were a kind of ‘self-medication’ for those suffering with mental illnesses who just slid into addiction.  However, Andrew Chambers decided to find out if this was the cause through the scientific method. 

He and his team at the medical school of Indiana University compared the adult mood- and drug addiction related behavior of two groups of adult rats.  One group underwent surgery to purposely damage their amygdalas and another group underwent a fake surgery to simulate the same conditions. 

The rats that underwent the real surgery were found to be significantly more sensitive to cocaine and developed an addiction to the drug when addicted to it much faster. 

Dr. Chambers theorized that the reason the amygdalas are damaged in humans can vary.  Sometimes there are relatively rare cases of temporal lobe epilepsy, tumors or early brain injury.  However, these co-occurring drug addictions and mental illnesses are more common than that.  Chambers believes they could also be the result of developmental damage to the amygdale during early childhood.  An early emotional trauma combined with certain genetic backgrounds can alter the early development of the neural networks involved in the amygdala leading to brain disturbances.