“With ADHD, the rational part of the brain is less active than average, so it has more difficulty keeping big emotions in check,” says Lee. “Trauma is different – it primes the limbic system to overreact so much that the rational part of the brain is no match for the intensity of emotion.”
If you have ADHD, stimulants like amphetamines can help the brain feel normal because they increase activity in the prefrontal cortex. And if you have experienced trauma, drugs and alcohol can mute intense emotions.
“A common thread linking these traits is difficulty regulating emotions – and drugs and alcohol are a way of managing emotions.”
Professor Nicole Lee, National Drug Research Institute in Melbourne
This may help explain why cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) can help people beat addiction.
“We don’t know exactly how CBT works for addiction – but my personal belief is that it helps activate the prefrontal cortex by helping us be deliberately more mindful of our thoughts,” Lee says.
Around one in four of us grapples with alcohol, drugs or gambling at some time in our lives. Family history ups the risk, though how much of this is genetic and how much is learnt isn’t clear. But inheriting a gene variant that helps your body process alcohol slowly can increase the risk because you’re less likely to have adverse effects from alcohol.
“But it’s not inevitable,” says Lee. “It can take more than a higher risk alone to create dependence. You can be vulnerable to addiction because of genetics, for example, but it only becomes a problem when some stressor in your life activates that vulnerability.”
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Still, if there’s a family history of alcohol dependence, her advice is to be mindful of your drinking habits and if you do develop a problem, a period of abstinence, rather than moderation, is best.
As for the belief that “once an addict, always an addict” – that’s another myth whose time is up, according to experts. It’s not the reality, Lee says, with some research suggesting that 75 per cent of people either quit or moderate their habit.
Like the addictive personality myth, this concept discourages people from getting help because it perpetuates the stigma that clings to addiction, and implies there’s little hope of overcoming it, says Lubman.
“We know that the average time from developing a problem with alcohol to getting help is about 18 years. If that were the case with cancer, there’d be an outcry. If we want people to get help earlier, we need to stop blaming them and treat addiction like any other health condition.”
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