“Drug addicts are drug addicts and alcoholics are alcoholics because of the choices they make. They’ve created sad situations, to be sure, but the situations exist solely because of choices they’ve made, choices that have hurt them.”

You sometimes hear people make variations on this statement today, although luckily, you hear it less often than before. But you still hear it. People still believe that drug addiction and alcohol abuse are choices that people willingly make.

Drug addiction and alcohol abuse are not that simple. There are choices involved in such drug and alcohol abuse, but they’re usually not as simple as waking up one morning and deciding to use a lot of a certain drug or drink a large amount of alcohol.

So many times, people end up abusing alcohol and drugs because they’re trying to cope with other issues in their lives. Since drugs and alcohol alter your mind and make you feel high or drunk, people abuse these substances in order to feel different things from what they’re already feeling.

But if this happens, people might end up struggling with drug addiction or alcoholism on top of the issues they were trying to avoid, which is commonly a mental illness such as depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), bipolar disorder, or eating disorders such as anorexia or bulimia. When people have a diagnosed mental illness and a substance use disorder problem, they have a condition known as a dual diagnosis or a co-occurring disorder.

It’s obvious, then, that substance use disorder and mental illness are so complex and so intertwined that they contribute to each other. That’s why it’s imperative that people with struggle with both seek treatment for both. Otherwise, one condition could remain strong (or re-emerge) and trigger the other, creating yet another codependent cycle of mental illness and substance use disorder.