The root causes of maladaptive behaviors and patterns of thought often
are associated with mediating factors:
I. Depression
Depression is the most common psychological disturbance among teenagers.
Typically, depression is associated with feelings of sadness, meaninglessness,
or emptiness
There are four sets of symptoms:
The gender difference here is that there is a higher prevalence among girls.
Interestingly, depression often occurs concommitantly with the use of
drugs.
Further depression and drug use are often linked to suicide attempts.
One of the main results of rampant depression among adolescents is suicide attempts.
Some Warning Signs:
With support from friends and family, and professional treatment, children who are suicidal can heal and return to a more healthy path of development.
Again, suicide - depresison - drug use/abuse are often part of the same,
larger pathology.
Something's the matter - these behaviors are symptomatic of a perceived
dilemma.
What to do when a teenager you know shows some of the warning signs?
For some reason, people tend to be very irrational about their body image. Eating Disorders are often a pathological response to negative body image. We tend to overeat because of a variety of stresses, then we crash diet, fail to lose weight, and have to deal with further negative self-image.
Sometimes our relationship with food surpasses this type of neurotic behavior, moving into one of the two main categories of Eating Disorder. It happens to girls much more often than to boys.
Anorexia Nervosa is characterized by a "relentless pursuit to be thin".
A teenager with this problem is typically a perfectionist, good in academics,
while simultaneously suffering from low self-esteem.
She looks in the mirror and sees fat, regardless of how thin she really
is. Ultimately she simply starves herself - sometimes resulting in damage
to her body, and in a minority of cases resulting in death.
Bulimia is a different illness, although thinness is still the goal. This person will often eat normally, even binge eat at times, then attempt to purge herself by vomiting or other means (she will sometimes use laxatives).
Eating disorders are apparently easy to hide for years, often being discovered almost by accident.
The "causes" of eating disorders can be seen by looking closely at the typical victims - young women. In our society, thinness is glorified in the fashion magazines, and other media. The idea is that thin is more attractive than even normal weight. Boys don't like girls who are fat!
In study after study, women report being dissatisfied with their weight. Some women are capable of maintaining this dissatisfaction while weight as little as 70% of their ideal, optimal, healthiest body weight. Conversely, young men can be as much as 30% overweight and still report satisfaction with their weight.
This preoccupation with body image, beyond healthiness, is yet another way the culture fosters unhealthy attitudes in the population. .
I. The Theoretical Approach. Theories are supposed to be:
A. So why do the kids take drugs?
Teenagers (as opposed to adult users) take drugs for different reasons.
For each reason there is a socially (morally) appropriate response *we* could make:
The root causes of maladaptive behaviors and patterns of thought often
are associated with mediating factors:
Kai T. Erikson, Merton Social Structure & Anomie - the idea here is that society provides "ends" or goals that are widely shared, but doesn't provide equal "means" or avenues to the realization of goals. Thus someone who wants to be rich might steal instead of work hard. Read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.
Chicago School Anomie /Alienation - Thomas, Durkheim - the idea here is that through a series of evolutionary events, some people find themselves on the margins of social life. Where they once were happy as carpenters who were responsible for building the whole house, now they are nailers, who only nailing boards together at the "house factory". They suffer an extreme loss of identity, resulting in anomie (feelings of never being satisfied). In their search for satisfaction, they experiment with cults, or sex, or drugs. Read Rivethead by Ben Hamper.
Differential Association - Sutherland & Cressy - the idea here is that when born into an environment that is developmentally pathological, one associates with the wrong crowd, resulting in the transmission of deviant values and behaviors. Read Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land.
B. Is the problem of drug & alcohol abuse a sociological or psychological problem?
How much is psychological (individual malfunctions)
How much is sociological (something about the structure of society
that allows the problem).
Primary & Secondary Deviance - the idea here is that almost everybody engages in primary deviance of some kind. This is usually trivial behavior that goes unnoticed until an official labelling event takes place. Here's a story, told by my teacher C. Eddie Palmer. It seems there once were two boys who plotted to steal bubblegum from a local candy store. The store owner saw one of the boys and called the police. When captured by the police, the boy who was identified kept his mouth shut and went to the reformatory, where he learned a whole bunch of criminal behaviors from the boys inside. All this time, the boy who escaped continued in school, as usual. After the reformatory, the boy with the record was labeled as a bad kid by the people in the neighborhood. Everytime something turned up missing, he was blamed. "Oh, there goes the thief!" they would say. Finally, the bad kid gave up trying to behave and submitted to every criminal impulse he had.
We can't always be sure that reasoning behind drug use is psychological and individual if there are societal underpinnings. One this is true, we can't solve social problems with psychological tactics. Prior to therapy we have to remove the outside causes.
The first law enforcement agency assigned to removing illicit alcohol from society was Eliot Ness and the Treasury Department of the Federal Government, which turned into the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms after Prohibition was repealed. After the distribution of alcohol was legalized, the agencies needed a new criminal offense to go after, so they began concentrating on marijuana and narcotics. At the time there were very few criminals in the drug business. As the agencies grew, so did the drug problem.
The idea here is that the policing of drug distribution might have less to do with law enforcement and the public welfare as it does with the encouragement of bureacracy. Further, as we add to the numbers of social control agents, we are increasing the likelihood that they will find people to charge with crimes. What happens when we catch all the criminals - what'll happen to all those police officers? This won't happen because
B. Drugs, in order of their preference among high school students who use them.
Males are using a wider variety of drugs with more frequency.
Females are catching up to males in the areas of alcohol consumption
and cigarette smoking.
C. Risk Factors
While the vast majority of adolescent drug users are not serious abusers,
there are some who are at-risk of the development of serious habits:
-psychological factors - individuals with certain personality characteristics - easily angered, highly impulsive, easily depressed, those who have achievement difficulties, and those who have been taught tolerant attitudes about deviance in general.
-interpersonal factors - those with distant, hostile, or conflicted family relationships, those with parents who are permissive or are users themselves.
-contextual - those living in a social context that makes drug use easier - ease of availability, lax community norms, inability of social control agents to enforce laws, mass media presentation of drug culture as glamorous.
Similarly there are factors that Decrease the likelihood of substance abuse:
D. Functions of Drug Use
To say that something is functional means that it serves some useful purpose or need - either to the individual or to society. In the case of drug use among adolescents, drug use as-a-problem provides jobs for police, lawyers and other legal types. It sells newspapers. It provides a rasion d'etre for therapists, counselors, and others in the helping professions.
Drug use also serves a personal function. The drug subculture arises as a reaction to urban competitiveness and the omnipresence of urban-industrialism in the form of an escape from its rigors.
Pretty simple, really. Kids take drugs so they won't have to compete. As members of a new subculture, they have their own norms and values (which is part of adolescence - to fool the adult crowd). They can belong to a group that values their presence. Further, the drug user can skirt competition by using denial, what Matza calls Techniques of Neutralization:
B. Primary Group Controls - from family, friends, work groups - if the primary group is not in favor of the behavior in question, the individual will be more likely to change.
C. Secondary Group Controls - through fines, bonuses, threat of imprisonment - if society implements a near zero-tolerance for the behavior, it will diminish.
D. Control through Force, Coercion and Punishment - From a societal point of view, individuals can be made examples for others to see. An old sailor told me a story once that is relevant here. When he was in Navy recruit training in the early 1940s, he was asked to witness the punishment phase of a Courts Martial in which the offender was being "drummed" out of the Naval Service. Whatever his crime, his judges thought it was severe enough to warrant the following treatment:
He was marched into the center of a large parade ground that was lined with sailors/witnesses. In the center of the field there were three men, an officer who would read his punishment, and two enlisted sailors who were to rip and tear all military ensignia from the prisoner's clothing. All this time, there were drummers playing the same, slow cadence. After all the military markings were torn away from his clothing, the legs, sleeves, and front and back of his shirt were ripped open. Then they took away his shoes. He was ordered to turn around and march to the front gate of the Navy base. As he walked away, all the witnesses turned their backs to him. When he got to the gate, his escorts opened it and shoved him through it.
This depiction of a Successful Degradation Ceremony illustrates the power of social control when applied ruthlessly and publically. The point of it was not to make an impression on the prisoner, who was thought to be morally bankrupt. The point of the ceremony was to encourage good behavior from all who witnessed the event.