Psychology is a discipline devoted to comprehending human being behavior. It seeks to enhance life satisfaction and quality by outlining actions or adaptive behaviors that can either promote or deteriorate a person’s well-being. Psychologists have instituted both personality and psychological theories that attempt to develop an understanding of drug onset. According to Association of Mental Health Clergy (AMHC), personality traits have been examined in relation to drug abuse to explore their significance as risk factors. The modes of thinking or personality characteristics influence the proclivity of a person developing a substance use problem. This essay examines the personality or psychological theoretical family of drug onset.
AMHC’s (2017) research is just but an addition or a vivid revelation of Howard Becker’s analysis of becoming a marijuana addict. Becker (1953) argues that a person can have a certain behavior that introduces a series of social experiences from which the individual obtains the conception of bad or good behaviors. Hence, the motivation to take a substance arises from to disposition to take part in activity during the social learning process. The AMHC organization, on the other hand, formulates a psychopathological paradigm of drug addiction that identifies personality challenges that can result in drug onset such as mood disturbances, mental disorders, and cognitive deficiencies.
According to AMHC (2017), half of the people who seek treatment for addiction have a mental anomaly while the rest develop what is commonly referred to as the addictive personality. An addictive personality encompasses behaviors such as impulse deregulation, emotional deregulation, and the denial of clear issues. Psychotherapy comes in to highlight and solve underlying psychological challenges consequentially improving a person’s emotional or cognitive functioning and restructuring his or her personality. The addictive behavior is examined developmentally in terms of reorganization and organization, actions, concepts, and meanings. Drug onset is thus ascribed to predispositions and motives rooted deeply in the individual’s personality or behavior (Becker, 1953).
References
Association of Mental Health Clergy (AMHC) (2017). Psychological Causes of Addiction. Retrieved January 26, 2017 from http://www.amhc.org/1408-addictions/article/48345- psychological-causes-of-addiction.
Becker H. (1953). Becoming a Marihuana User. American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 59, No. 3, pp. 235-242.
