Addiction Treatment Blog

In 1954, Olds and Milner discovered that there appeared to be pleasure spots in the brain. Implanting electrodes in certain areas of the brain, through which a rat can give itself an electric current by pressing on a lever, produced in most brain areas nothing of note. In some areas, however, the rats seemed keen on the effects of self-stimulation and, in some cases, if left to their own devices would self-stimulate to the exclusion of all else – even food and drink.

As mentioned, noradrenaline was discovered in the brain in 1954. In 1959, a second catecolamine, dopamine, was identified, which was shown to be deficient in Parkinson’s disease.

The later mapping of dopamine-containing neurones has shown that they too, like noradrenergic neurones, tend to originate in a discrete area, the ventral tegmentum. Some of these neurones run to strictly motor areas of the brain and constitute the nigrostriatal system, and it is loss of nerve calls in this pathway that leads to Parkinson’s disease. Read more…

Effects of Drugs on Sex

Table of Contents

• Potency
• Orgasm
• Libido
• Aphrodisiacs
• Yohimbine
• Trazodone
• Nefazodone and Cyproheptadine
• Glyceril Trinitrate
• Transcutaneous Absorption
• Intracaversonal Injections
• Bethanecol
• Dyspareunia and Orgasm
• Libido
• Anaphrodisiacs
• Sex Addiction Treatment Clinic
• Do You Need Help?

Read more…

The range of sexual difficulties can be devastating.

Table of Contents

• Potency
• Ejaculation and Orgasm
• Libido
  • Sexual Orientation, Objects and Practices
  • The Female Sexual Response
• Sex Addiction Treatment Available
• Do you need help?

Potency

The sexual problem in men that is most likely to lead a request for medical assistance is a disorder of erectile function, leading to impotence. This refers to an inability to achieve or to sustain an erection, and may derive from either an organic or psychogenic source.

The organic causes of impotence stem from either problems with the nervous supply to blood vessels of the penis (neurogenic causes), or problems with the blood vessels themselves (vasculogenic causes). There are a number of other illnesses or disorders which may play a part, from local diseases of the penis, Peyronie’s disease, which involves excessive curvature of the penis (few penises are entirely straight when erect) to diseases which affect the whole body, such as liver or kidney disease. Read more…

Illness is in part what the world as done to a victim but in a larger part is what the victim has done with his world, and with himself.

Karl Menninger, quoted in ‘Illness as Metaphor’ by Susan Sontag.

Drug abuse is a cause for many serious illnesses, including HIV (AIDS).

From time to time the healthcare professional will encounter an individual with a medical condition who abuses drugs. Although not condoning the taking of these substances, it is desirable that those in a position to advise are able to provide information on whether the drug is liable to exacerbate the condition. The sections below provide brief details which may be helpful in advising those with some of the more common medical conditions. The information given should be used as a guide only. The data available are sparse in most cases and while it is hoped that the details in this chapter will be useful, every patient’s particular circumstances will differ and one should be cautious about extrapolating limited information to all situations in which it could be applicable.

It is difficult to find data in the advisability of drug abuse in those suffering from concomitant medical conditions. The data given here are based upon details of side effects that have been reported in the medical literature and knowledge of drug handling by the body. This information is incomplete because none of the drugs of abuse have been subject to large-scale clinical trials at the doses abused. This is the main mechanism by which side effect profiles of therapeutic drugs are determined. This being the case, most of the data on adverse effects from street drugs are derived from small-scale studies, case reports, surveys and anecdotal evidence. Causality can also be difficult to ascertain because many users employ a variety of drugs simultaneously. Many drug abusers have a poor quality of life due to bad living conditions and/or inadequate nutrition; this may make them more susceptible to various diseases. Read more…

Disinhibition is literally the opposite of inhibition. and a state where normal social restraints of behaviour are lost. People grow merry with alcohol as the alcohol first anaesthetizes their inhibitions, then their ability to hold a conversation, before finally it removes their ability to stand upright or make their way unassisted.

One of the early signs of hypomania and mania is loss of inhibition. The personality of the person with manic depressive disorder changes, as they at first become the life and soul of the party. As hypomania progresses there is further disinhibition; the individual may engage in extremely frank conversations with colleagues and complete strangers and become over-familiar with people he or she would normally be highly respectful of. The individual will then most likely spend extravagantly, run around starting numerous tasks, act on every impulse, become sexually promiscuous, irritable, and unable to concentrate for more than a couple of minutes as thought process become increasingly disorganized. Read more…

Mental health problems may affect your sexual life.

Mental health difficulties and relationship problems affect your sex life. How you feel about yourself reflects in how much you and your partner can enjoy sex. If you are feeling low and anxious, maybe tired, your self-image is likely to be low and this may contribute towards a loss of interest.

Some people experience anxiety over sexual identity and this can exacerbate or trigger mental health problems. People who have had abusive childhood experiences, and who are vulnerable to psychological distress, may experience difficulties around sex. Anxiety makes it difficult for people to ‘let go’ and ‘enjoy’ themselves – for example, some people find it difficult to reach orgasm (anorgesmia). Whilst it would be rewarding to have fulfilling sex life, often sex is the last thing on your mind whilst you are experiencing mental health problems.

Some illnesses can actually increase the sex drive (libido). People who are experiencing a ‘manic’ episode, for example, may go through overwhelming feelings of sexual desire and may become quite promiscuous.

Medication and Sex ‘Drive’

Psychotropic mecications, for example anti-depressants, may affect sex drive and performance. You may feel reduced libido. Men may also experience impotence (inability to get sustain an erection), or delayed ejaculation.

How to Get Help If You’re Worried About Your Sex Life?

Discuss this with your GP/health care team. It might be worth considering drugs such as Viagra for men finding difficulty getting and sustaining an erection. You might discuss whether an alternative medication would be more appropriate for you. You can, of course, address any sexual issues with your therapist if you are receiving professional psychological input.

If you think you are experiencing sexual difficulties linked to past issues, discuss this with your therapist/GP. Read more…

It’s kind of hard to come to terms with the words we need to use because all of the words already have a meaning to people. For instance, it makes no sense to call gambling a drug because it’s obviously a behaviour. To call taking cocaine a behaviour is confusing because it mixes up the drug with the action of taking it. So we need to come up with a word that means, in essence, stuff that releases dopamine. Science already has a term for that in behavioural psychology. The word is “reinforcer.” Reinforcer doesn’t really do it for me, but if you like that word for what we’re talking about, I can live with it. My problem is that for behavioural scientists it brings up the idea that the person is normal and that no illness exists. The word I like better is “reward.” A reward causes dopamine to be released in the reward center of the brain. It doesn’t tell us if the reward comes from outside or inside, and it doesn’t tell us if the person is ill or well. It’s just a reward.

Now, we can see that if people have normal reward systems and get normal reward from normal life, there is no need for other external reward inputs. However, if someone doesn’t have a normal reward system and needs a specific behaviour or drug to feel normal reward, then we will see their focus concentrate on that useful reward.

It might be helpful to know what sort of things give us a reward signal. For people with addiction these things can become compulsive. These include alcohol and drugs, of course, including nicotine. As well there is food and sex. Interestingly, novel stimuli also work and that would include 30 new images every second like TV or a video game. While I believe addiction is a single disease, people point out to me all the time the differences between addicts such as cocaine addicts and compulsive overeaters: “You don’t see people grinding up hamburger and injecting it,” they say with a smile to tell me how wrong I am. The difference is that different drugs and behaviours effect the reward system through different mechanisms. For instance, cocaine works directly in the MFB to block the reuptake of dopamine (it blocks the vacuum cleaner raising the dopamine level) while food works through several different sensory mechanisms to release dopamine.

The Causeway Retreat addiction treatment experts are ready for help to you and your loved ones 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. Please give us a call on +44 (0)207 100 7260 and talk to one of our doctors or nurses.

In part, that’s true, but most people find that their drug use escalates much faster than 7% a decade. Most people attribute the increased need for their substance or behaviour to tolerance, or what science calls neuro-adaptation. Before I tell you why I think addicts use more over time, I have to tell you a bit about tolerance.

Tolerance, neuro-adaptation, is when a nerve adjusts to a stimulating signal in order to go back to the way it was before it got the signal. For instance, let’s say that a guy who’s never had any alcohol takes a drink. Immediately, in order to keep him from failing over, his brain cells change the receptor that sees the alcohol. They’ve gotten too big a signal, and if the brain decreases the number of receptors that see alcohol, the signal will go down. Some tolerance is fast like that and some is slower, requiring about two weeks or so. Alcohol is the classic drug when you look at tolerance; the more you drink the more you are used to it, the more tolerant you are. So you can explain why an alcoholic who started drinking a six pack a day is 4 years later drinking a case a day and still feeling the same level of “drunk”. But what about a drug like cocaine? It doesn’t cause tolerance; it causes something like the opposite called sensitization. Why do cocaine users need more cocaine after using for a while if it causes the opposite of tolerance?

Now we come to what I think is the real reason we use more drug after a while. If it was tolerance, cocaine users would pick a dose and stick with it, but that doesn’t happen. The real reason I think we need more and more drug as time goes by (or more and more food, sex, gambling, just fill in the blank) is because of how the Nucleus Accumbens works. Remember I told you about the dopamine level in the Medial Forebrain Bundle and how the dopamine hits the Nucleus Accumbens? We called it the reward signal. What it more specifically and accurately encodes is not just reward but something called “Reward Prediction Error.” In a study at Columbia, researchers found that his area of the brain compares the current reward with the average reward and only fires when the current reward is greater than the expected average of what had come before. Read more…

Addiction is a progressive disease. That means it gets worse with time whether the person with addiction is using something or not. The reason is that we lose dopamine producing cells as we age. This was shown by Dr. Nora Volkow at her lab in Brookhaven, New York. Averaged over her subjects, Dr. Volkow found that we lose about 7% of our dopamine receptors with every decade of life. She also looked at the decrease in dopamine producing neurons in the reward system and found that they may decrease with age as well. Sort of a double whammy, isn’t it? Well, there’s actually a triple whammy. Along with the dopamine receptor decrease in the reward centre, we get a serotonin signal to the frontal cortex that lets us know we’re a good person. Many have noticed that low self-esteem is a natural part of addiction, and I think this is one reason for it. If the MFB isn’t functioning right, we aren’t getting enough serotonin to our frontal cortex.

So basically with age we make less dopamine, can use less of the dopamine that we make, and can’t send the signal from the reward centre to the frontal cortex as well either. You’re probably thinking this is hopeless, aren’t you?

I don’t think it is. We know we can raise dopamine receptor levels by changing behavior and thinking (as in recovery), and we can raise levels of dopamine and serotonin with medications. So while we can’t stop aging, we can treat the effects.

If you or your loved one suffering from any addiction, please give us a call on +44 (0)207 100 7260 and we will help you.

Our society likes to think that drugs cause addiction. It’s actually the other way around for most people with addiction. The addiction causes the drug use. To explain this better, I’ll have to tell you some of the anatomy of the brain that involves addiction. The picture below is a crude diagram of a part of the brain called the reward center.

Brain Reward Centre

The circle labeled VTA represents a group of brain cells (neurons) called the Ventral Tegmental Area. They produce a neurotransmitter called dopamine (DA), which they release to provide a signal to other neurons. They send this dopamine signal to another group of cells called the Nucleus Accumbens (NA). This is where the magic happens. Whatever you’re doing when a big slug of dopamine hits the shell of the Nucleus Accumbens gets coded as a good thing that’s necessary for survival and that you should do more of. Dopamine at the Nucleus Accumbens is why we do anything twice. For normal people normal levels of dopamine release provide normal levels of pleasure and reward. But some people don’t have the normal levels of dopamine and so normal activities don’t lead to normal reward. They need bigger stimulation to feel what other people feel normally. Read more…