Teenagers Drinking

This article is my opinion - it is based on my years of work and my experience - as a doctor, psychiatrist, mother and grandmother. I am writing this article about the excessive levels of alcohol consumption in a growing number of teenagers.

I confess to being not only relevant, but somewhat perplexed.

First I ask the question - "In the last 40yrs, he was a major change in our body?

In my work, I updated with new breakthroughs. However, now I am afraid that during this time, I must have missed a major breakthrough in knowledge. If not, then I am left to question "keep only what is?" If yes, who?

Let me explain.

For 35 years I have enjoyed my work - except for a period of six months during my training for the highest degree, MRCPsych (UK), while I was supposed to work for six months to one unit alcohol. In my opinion, the spirit is and always has been the most important organ in the body - a car whose steering wheel does not work is not the best vehicle to drive on roads complicated life.

But this time I found the most depressing I've ever encountered at work - for a reason. Most people with whom I worked were there because of their own deliberate actions. Some people, such as those with unresolved grief, drank first for a reason - but alcohol does not cure anything. He just added the problem of depression. I witnessed the devastation slow many lives.

Some people have an inherited tendency to alcoholism. This means that the person must abstain from drinking alcohol or suffer the consequences of addiction. Nut allergy can kill - that person should never eat nuts or they will die. I am not indifferent - on the contrary, I have great concern for youth.

However, let's be honest! The vast majority of young people who drink too much because they chose to do and enjoy doing so, their peers and friends do this, it is "what they do." In the fashion typical adolescent, they are no apparent concern about the consequences. But it is surprising - given the level of consumption of many o the adults around them? Who are they supposed to learn?

I am writing not as a watchdog to tell people what to do, without knowing the difficulties myself. I spent my childhood and adolescence before asthma medications - be assured, this is not an easy option. I had many health problems - uninvited and without cause of itself.

I did not tell people what to do in my work - I listened to, treated, guided and given them options for a new way of thinking / believing / acting. They could choose to listen and change - or not.

The experience of working in the unit of alcohol has never left my memory. Most patients were young and potentially healthy, many were in their twenties and early thirties, but have been gradually eroding their health, their intelligence, their family life, marriages, and careers. It was sad. An 8 year old girl came to visit her mother. Shortly after the girl left, her mother had no recollection of having a daughter. Alcohol affects the short-term memory - without which life has little meaning.

It has long been recognized in the medical world that women are more easily damaged by alcohol than men, and yet, young women have now been drinking as much if not more men. Add to which there is the potential impact damage to babies born to mothers who drink.

The amounts that had been drunk by patients in the room to take them to the cravings of the unit to help them, was much less on average than young people drink alcohol now liberal society , and it took only about 10 years of dedicated drinking enough to reach their damaged state. The other factor is that these men and women began to drink in their late teens - not the CMU.