The teenage years is one of, if not, the toughest years a person will ever have to go through. With all the pressures and stress of growing up and trying to fit in, it’s no wonder that more than just a few teens break down. In her show, Oprah Prime, the renowned A-lister host featured a 20-year old who shared her experiences of being a high school star-athlete who then spiraled quickly into a college dropout-slash-heroin-addict:
“Twenty-year-old Claire grew up in an affluent community, attended an elite East Coast boarding school and was an all-American high-school athlete, winning varsity letters in three sports and earning an athletic scholarship to attend college. Not long ago, she seemed to have it all, but life looks different for Claire today.
Now a college drop-out, Claire is addicted to heroin. She recently spoke with Oprah about her accelerated path from scholarship student to drug addict on an episode of “Oprah Prime” focusing on heroin addiction.
… Before turning to heroin, Claire experimented with prescription painkillers supplied by her friends. “I just knew some other athletes who had been prescribed painkillers. They had extra ones lying around,” she says. “Before I knew it, just a couple months down the line, I was doing heroin.”
Today, there is no clear profile as to who in the student body is dependent and addicted to illegal drugs and controlled substances. It could be the student council president, or the quarterback of the high school football team, or it could also be the most intelligent guy in school. All teenagers are at risk of becoming exposed to drugs, thereby becoming drug addicts later on. Addiction can cost them their future and, in extreme cases, even their lives.
Drug addiction is a surface problem that has layers of underlying causesIt helps that there are reliable Missouri drug rehab programs designed to relieve teen drug addiction. Facilities that offer this, such as Midwest Institute for Addiction, also work hard to try and help wayward teens solve the problems that led them to drug addiction in the first place, and will assist so they can get back on track to a good life.
There are a lot of methods used in treating drug addiction among teens and adults. Cognitive behavioral therapy in St. Louis facilities, for example, is one of the more known methods used to help their patients understand what led them to drugs, and how they can best defend themselves against behavioral influences that could cause them to relapse. More than prescribing medication to the patients, this kind of conscious understanding about what they are going through, and how to deal with their emotions, is what teenage patients need.
(Source: Former Star Athlete Tells ‘Oprah Prime’ About Her Descent Into Heroin Addiction (VIDEO), The Huffington Post, March 18, 2014)
