Through my time as an intern at a Behavioral Health and Addiction Clinic, I saw first hand what addiction does to people’s lives. Arguably one of the most common and troubling addiction is alcoholism.

 

In psychology courses, they teach you that chemical dependency is a result of altered neural mechanisms in the brain. Alcohol itself increases the activity of GABA, serotonin, dopamine, and endorphin releasing mechanisms and it decreases the activity of glutamate releasing mechanisms. Endorphins specifically are shown to decrease pain and cause feelings of euphoria. Over prolonged periods of alcohol exposure, these neurotransmitter release mechanisms are altered.

 

Working in the addiction clinic, I found that chemical dependency begins earlier than your neural mechanisms are affected. Most of the time, people suffering from alcohol dependency had an underlying problem that needed to be addressed such as abuse, rape, tragic losses, etc. These are situation where it would be very easy to drink your sorrows away, but it only leads to bigger issues. In the clinic, we found that the chemical portion of addiction was handled much easier once counseling had been sought to mentally and emotionally come to terms with whatever lead to the patient to alcohol.

 

In psychology when learning about addiction, it is purely a discussion on chemical dependence. I found that this way of speaking about addiction lead me to have a predisposed belief that if you fix the chemicals, every other problem would be fixed as well. In the classroom, you learn what leads to addiction and how it is dealt with chemically or pharmaceutically, but the clinic offered a unique mental health approach.

 

I had a predisposed belief that you could simply put the patients on medication and fix the chemical portion, which could make the mental portion easier to cope with, but this was proved untrue when I began working in the clinic. Seeing patients in the clinic revealed that there was normally more too the issue than simply a chemical imbalance. Typically trauma, such as I have previously discussed, leads to the imbalance, which in turn leads to addiction. Addiction at its core is a chemical imbalance, but relapse is so effortless if the underlying issue is not addressed.

 

Addiction counseling has a huge impact on curing addiction disorders and that is something not commonly discussed in the classroom. Working under Mr. Richard Cole and Dr. Michelle “MiKi” Kitchen taught me a lot of what addiction entails. Looking back at when I began as an intern at the Behavioral Health and Addiction Clinic, I was very closed-minded due to the strictly scientific knowledge I had received concerning addiction and dependence. This experience of working in the clinic and with patients suffering from addiction showed me to think beyond my scientific background and to consider what put the patients in this difficult place to begin with. Working in this clinic taught me to look beyond scientific reasoning for medical issues and to not take all of the information I am given at face value. It taught me to always investigate what I am taught, to dig deeper into a subject to expand my knowledge, and to discover a better understanding of why things happen.