Depression, Anxiety, Bipolar Disorder, Adoption — Each Can Lead to Alcohol and/or Drug Abuse

Tom Rees

BLOG SUMMARY

This site will bring you some very real and exciting insight into anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder and adoption first-hand from someone who has a lifetime of experience dealing with all four conditions – me. I realize the title is a mouthful, and I also recognize – acutely – that one of the four conditions in the title may surprise or even offend some people, and that is adoption. Anxiety, depression, and bipolar disorder are all psychiatric mood disorders where one might anticipate or even expect that such “terrible” afflictions (tongue in cheek) such as alcohol problems and/or addictive tendencies may be tied to such disorders. But adoption? Adoption is supposed to be such a beautiful thing — how and why would somebody ever suggest that being adopted could even be related to alcohol or drug abuse? Perhaps this man is an alcoholic or drug addict and had a bad adoptive experience and so he is blaming his alcohol or drug problems on the adoption, you may be thinking.

Well actually, “No” is the answer to that thought. I am probably one of the luckiest people in this world as far as having had an absolutely amazing experience being adopted. I have two of the most loving, supportive, dedicated and responsive parents on the planet, and they are still together and in love at 84 after 63 years of marriage. I have also been fortunate to have led a great life that has included a wonderful childhood, a warm and loving sister, excellent education, world travel experiences, a very successful career, and just about everything a normal person could want out of life.

Unfortunately, in my mid 30′s, I began to suffer from depression that was worse than the regular bouts of mood swings I’d dealt with for most of my life. It progressed to the extent of clinical depression where I had to be hospitalized in 2006 for treatment. It was there that I learned that many people who have depression issues can develop Bipolar 2 if their depression is never treated. I was diagnosed as “bipolar 2″ and a “smiling depressive” (the worst kind, because we hide the pain so well nobody is aware of what we are going through, and thus no offers of help are forthcoming) . BP2 is much less serious than bipolar 1 which a person has for life,and 2 tends to set in later in life –especially in those that have depression, as I said. It is characterized by wide mood swings which can range from feeling like you are on top of the world to being totally paralyzed with depression and anxiety, to the point where you may not be able to get out of bed and deal with life at any level. Its downside is devastating and painful and beyond the ability to describe, for those who have not suffered it.

Suffice it to say it is worse than any torture you could imagine. You know you could and should be up and around dealing with things, but just existing is so dark, so empty, so awfully fraught with fear and full of a horrible anxiety so severe you are in a full body sweat — to the extent that you’d just rather not be here. Bipolar 2s do not tend to be suicidal, but honestly it is so bad you would do anything to not have to experience such terrible mental anguish, pain and torture. The worst thing about it is you know it is all in your mind! You know that your very own brain is putting you through this agony!  How could an organ in your own body betray you to such a horrific degree? You know that is totally abnormal, also, and that notion just further exacerbates all the bad feelings. You can’t blame it on any external event such as your wife cheating on you or somebody dying or shooting you in the spine and paralyzing you for life. It would make sense to react with agony or even anger on some levels to all those things. But in a bipolar depression you have nothing to blame except your own brain — can you imagine trying to have to make sense out of that? If you use any kind of substance to relieve your discomfort you will likely get a “dual diagnosis” of both the mood disorder and chemical dependence.

The description above may help readers understand how, if alcohol or prescription pills or illegal drugs can relieve the intensity of such anguish, an individual can turn to these for some measure of relief. Doing so, however, unbeknown to the victim of the mood disorder, actually makes the illness worse — if you can imagine that. So the bad feelings intensify and the patient feels he or she now needs the alcohol or drugs even MORE.  And this cycle continues until suddenly they are addicted to alcohol or pills or heroin or whatever. When that corner is turned it results in alcoholism and/or drug addiction, because whatever is giving the relief — God forbid they not be able to continue the cycle. At that point he or she has become certain they will DIE if they can’t get that relief. The blog will delve more into all this, because when you understand what is really happening to the brain from a physiological standpoint, it is an extraordinary story — and you will come to truly understand addiction for perhaps the first time in your life.

Related to adoption being included in this title and a reader being uneasy or downright offended by it, let me explain. Adoption can be and often is a wonderful thing, no doubt. The problem arises primarily with the adoptee who has come to an adoptive family through a totally closed adoption. This means the adoptee could possibly never know the important answers to questions related to health and his or her birth family’s qualities, talents , physical problems, mental problems, and issues related to alcoholism and addiction.

We cannot ignore the facts and statistics as they exist for adoptees today. Studies have shown that adoptees are almost exactly TWICE as likely to have mood disorders, receive psychological counseling  and run into addiction problems. That is a material statistic. While I was growing up and loved to party I drank a fair amount. Never lost a job, fought, hurt anybody or that sort of thing, but I was generally the last to leave a party or bar. Now my Mom and Dad were not teetotalers, but they drank two drinks each night. Growing up, I agonized over why I was so different than them. Why did I like to party so much, despite the fact that it hurt my parents to see the degree to which I played at night in my teens and 20′s?

At age 35, when I found my birth mother, many questions were answered. At this point I was suffering from recurrent depressions which seemingly came out of nowhere, and I was worried about whether I could be an alcoholic or not. Well, I discovered that she had left my father due to his alcoholism, and I learned that he drank to help manage his moods. By today’s standards, he was either a depressive or a bipolar individual. As adoptees, we have to live with the DNA we are dealt, but boy would it have been nice to know what I was up against at an earlier age. The other factor you must weigh in was that when birth mom and birth dad “did it”, they had a lapse of judgment and didn’t use protection in a time (1959) when that really mattered. Well, alcohol played a key role in that decision making (or lack thereof) and if a birth father and birth mother were both drunk or high when they conceived, it’s likely the child received at least some of “the addiction bug”.

I wrote adoption into the title because I hope I can help perhaps just ONE other adoptee know what the score is so he or she can address the problem sooner, rather than later. And as an aside, I don’t think in today’s environment of increasingly open  adoptions that this sort of issue will pose the potential psychological problems that I know from talking to scores of other friends in closed adoptions, that it did for us. But the fact remains — you may end up having an alcohol or addiction problem due to nothing more than your DNA. Knowing this would have brought me much more comfort when younger, instead of wondering why I was so different and what was wrong with me. If you read the last Page before my posts, it is called The Amazing Correlation Between Adoption and Mood Disorders, and this best explains why adoption is part of this title.

“Genetic studies have isolated a gene that causes alcohol dependence and that is usually transmitted from affected fathers to sons. Other genetic studies have demonstrated that close relatives of an alcoholic are four times more likely to become alcoholics themselves. Furthermore, this risk holds true even for children who were adopted away from their biological families at birth and raised in a nonalcoholic adoptive family, with no knowledge of their biological family’s difficulties with alcohol.” The Encyclopedia of Mental Disorders”,

I hope you enjoy my articles in the blog. I am selling nothing other than honesty on this site.

THOMAS D REES – BACKGROUND

In the end before I finally got treatment, my life turned into a roller coaster ride. In about 3 years I went from making a million dollars and having a house at the top of Bel Air with all the trappings (yacht and wife included) — to living with my dog in a garage without water at the bottom of Pasadena.

This “climax”, if you can call it that, was primarily due to a multi-year depression and an awful anxiety that I allowed to get out of control and chose for some bizarre reason not to treat. It just got worse. All that pain (you can’t imagine how much), yet my big, fat ego wouldn’t admit to a problem!  I had depression and anxiety eating away at the core of my soul on the one hand, to bad habits and vices on the other. My life had turned into a literal hell on earth, which can be better understood in the blog. There’s no reason anyone else should have to suffer so and reach the point I did. The real message I’d like to convey is that with proper treatment you can prevail through it all — and if I can do it, anybody can. That’s the miracle and why I can share hope.

If you look for one, you can find a lesson in every hand that you are dealt. I’d like to think others may be able to learn something valuable and/or avoid living in the dark world I fell into.  If you find yourself fighting what may be some kind of disorder in the form of constant anxiety or just feeling “down” alot of the time, I am an example of somebody who was once hopelessly buried by those feelings. I survived after getting treatment and I am a happier, better man for it today — and I don’t take anything for granted as I used to.  After “giving back” for several years managing sober livings and working with VH1′s Celebrity Rehab, I have spent a great deal of time and energy helping other people with the same or more severe problems. With the advent of Sober Living Search I am now in a position to help people AND  make money again. My full career details and peer recommendations can be found on the premiere business network Linked In

Subjects which you can learn more about are lined up over the posts so that if you want to explore stories with that tag, you need only click on the tag subject. Many subjects are inter-related including: Adoption, Addiction, Alcoholism, Anger, Anxiety, Bipolar II, Depression, Dual diagnosis, Mood Disorders, Aging, Celebrity Addiction, Stress, Living Well, Beating Depression, Coping Skills, Happiness.

Related articles:

• An Anxious World: Alcohol Use & Anxiety Disorders (brighthub.com)
• Mood Disorders Going Undetected in U.S. Children (nlm.nih.gov)
• 8 Ways to Help Your Bipolar Loved One Cope (beliefnet.com)
• Clues Help ID Depressed People at Risk of Bipolar Disorder (webmd.com)