Mental Illness And Substance Abuse Disorder Essay

Mental illness and substance abuse are two disorders that can have a significant impact on an individual and their well-being. Many times, when people think of these disorders, they view them as individual conditions, but is there a correlation between the two? Mental illness is defined by the American Psychiatric Association as a broad term used to describe a wide range of health conditions involving changes in emotion, thinking, or behavior (Njoku, 2022). It refers to various mental disorders like anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, ADHD, and more. On the other hand, the American Psychiatric Association defines substance abuse disorder as a complex condition in which someone has uncontrolled, persistent, and excessive use of a substance,

According to the National Institute of Mental health, it’s estimated that one in five adolescents live with a mental illness in the U.S (Mental Illness, 2023). In addition, substance abuse disorders have been a growing problem among adolescents and adults, effects millions of people yearly. The significance of this research helps us to not only better understand mental illness and substance abuse disorder, but also the correlation between the two. The correlation between mental illness and substance abuse disorder is important to research and understand to determine better ways to decrease the percentage of individuals with substance abuse disorder. Knowledge and early recognition on the correlation is essential to implementing timely interventions to prevent debilitating substance-related disorders later in life and supply adolescents with the help they need in advance. The purpose of this paper is to review the literature to show the correlation between mental illness and substance abuse disorder, specifically in

The first article reported that based on their evaluation, “35% of reported adolescents with substance abuse disorder also had a mental health problem (Winstanley et al., 2012). This shows that there is a high co-occurrence between a mental health diagnosis and substance abuse disorder. The second article showed even more correlation between the two and stated a, “significantly increased risk for developing addiction in ADHD, ODD or CD, and depression” (Groenman et al., 2017). In addition, it was reported that the risk is particularly high for those with ADHD and conduct disorder as it increases their risk of developing a substance abuse disorder by more than twofold” (Groenman et al., 2017). The authors of this article even went as far as stating that their findings emphasize the need for early detection and treatment of mental health to prevent debilitating substance-related disorders later in life. Finally, the results provided by the third article showed, “The cumulative incidence of substance-related disorders in the mental disorder group increased faster than that in the control group and reached 5 times higher by the end of year (Chiu et al., 2018). More importantly for this specific research question it was reported that for adolescents aged 10-19, those with specific mental disorders had 14.55-fold higher risk for