What is Substance Use?
It is a medical condition, not a character flaw.
Substance Use
When people hear "substance use," they often picture something extreme, meth, heroin, hard drugs. But most people use some kind of substance at some point, a glass of wine with dinner, a prescribed sleep aid, a beer at a barbecue.
Substance use includes:
Alcohol
Cannabis
Prescription medications like sleeping pills, muscle relaxers, or opioid pain medication
Illicit drugs
For most people, using a substance now and then doesn't cause lasting harm.
But for someone with a brain injury, that same amount of use can affect the brain differently, and that's where substance use disorder comes in.
Substance Use Disorder
Substance use disorder (SUD) is a medical condition, and it's treatable.
It develops when a pattern of using alcohol or other drugs starts causing real distress or getting in the way of daily life.
It's not a character flaw, and it's not a choice someone keeps making on purpose. Doctors diagnose it on a spectrum, mild, moderate, or severe, based on how many signs are present. It might look like needing more of a substance just to feel normal, finding it impossible to cut back even when you want to, or spending so much time using that it crowds out everything else.
What TBI and SUD can look like
None of these people set out
to develop a substance use problem.
Their brains changed first
and the substance use followed.
TBI and SUD aren't often talked about as related, but for many people, they are. A brain injury can change how a person handles risk, impulses, and stress, which can raise the risk of substance use.
And substance use raises the risk of the kind of trauma falls, crashes, violence that causes a TBI in the first place. Each one can feed the other.
It might be the person who got a concussion playing high school football, and years later can't figure out why one beer turns into six.
It might be a mom who survived a car accident, and now snaps at her kids in a way that scares her, right around the same time her wine at night became wine most of the day.
It might be a veteran who fell during a training exercise, never got checked out, and started taking more of his prescribed pain medication than the label said, just to feel steady.