High school can be a hard time for many teens. It’s that juncture in between childhood and adulthood where we are figuring out who we are. Between making friends, doing well in school, thinking about college, extracurricular activities, jobs, boyfriend/girlfriend, and the like, many of us feel anxiety in some sense. Some students do just fine and seem to excel at everything with ease. Some of us turn to other self-destructive ways of alleviating anxiety, like I did.
For me, high school was ridden with social and academic anxiety. I turned to drugs to relieve the pressure (or so I thought).The drugs gave me a feeling of euphoria, like everything was going to be ok (as long as I was high). My grades fell, I stopped showing up to class, I got violent, etc. Soon, I felt like I needed the drugs to function and be comfortable and I surrounded myself with people of the same mentality. This made created the illusion that we were being cool and rebelling, but in fact, all we was doing was throwing our future away and learning some valuable life lessons.
I know I’m just one person, and my story is just another cliché and rather irrelevant in the big scheme of things. That’s why I’m including a study from the American Journal of Psychiatry by DeWit et al. titled, “Age at First Alcohol Use: A Risk Factor for the Development of Alcohol Disorders.” DeWit et al. (2000) conducted a longitudinal study on a group of about six thousand lifetime drinkers. The results showed that 13.5% of the subjects who began to drink at ages 11-14 met the criteria for alcohol abuse diagnosis 10 years later; and 15.9% had a diagnosis of alcohol dependence. For those who began to drink at age 19, the results were 2.0% and 1.0% respectively. This is not speculation nor is it theory, drinking at an early age when the brain is nearly fully developed can have detrimental effects.
Sadly, other studies show the prevalence of alcohol in high school. In an article titled, “Binge Drinking and Associated Health Risk Behaviors Among High School Students.” For American Academy of Pediatrics, Miller et al. (2007), argues that underage drinking contributes to the 3 leading causes of death (unintentional injury, homicide, suicide) among persons aged 12 to 20 years old.
In this study, the data is taken from the 2003 Youth Behavior Risk Survey. In it, 44.9% of high school students reported using alcohol in the last 30 days, with 28.8% of them reporting binge drinking. Binge drinking is in itself inherently dangerous and can be fatal. But this article illuminates the risk-related behaviors, such as, “Riding with a driver who had been drinking, being currently sexually active, smoking cigarettes or cigars, being a victim of dating violence, attempting suicide, and using illicit drugs.”
I’m sure you’ve heard these statistics before or something like them. I figure most readers will dismiss them as I once did. If you haven’t started, then don’t. There are other ways to deal with anxiety but it’s going to take some work. Not everything in life is instant gratification like drugs; to build up your self-esteem you must do esteemable things. Relying on a chemical to relieve anxiety or “take the edge off,” is not sustainable.
As a high school student who loved drugs, I could never imagine being without them. They made me who I was, gave me the confidence to do anything and kept me aloof enough to seem “cool.” But now, as an adult reaching 7 years of sobriety, who has been through it all, I can say there is no better life than being sober. I’ve never been so confidant and anxiety free since I got off of drugs and adopted a totally new lifestyle. It’s a lot to take in at first, but if your life gets bad enough you will be ready for the next step.
By: Kyle Egan, Anxiety In Teens Contributor
