Study: Teens' Minds Wired for Cheap Thrills
June 25 -- — Adolescents who experiment with drugs and alcohol couldn't pick a worse time in their lives to do it.
At that stage in their mental development, the part of the brain that tells them to experiment with drugs is much farther advanced than the part that's supposed to lend a little judgment to the situation.
If they keep going down that path, they may enter their 20s addicted to drugs, partly because addiction may owe as much to the mental developmental agenda as it does to substance abuse.
Doing drugs during the teenage years "really does make concrete changes in the way your brain operates, in a permanent sense," says Andrew Chambers, a Yale University psychiatrist and lead author of a study in the June issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry.
Chambers and his associates at Yale examined 140 previously completed research projects to see if they could link the various stages of development that adolescents go through with the high rate of addictions that occur early in life.
Earlier Start, Harder to Quit
Most people who can't give up drugs or alcohol or smoking were already addicted in their teenage years, the researchers found. That addiction was due to various causes. Some adolescents have a predisposition toward impulsiveness or recklessness because of genetics or a social situation, making them particularly vulnerable to addiction.
But the researchers also found reason to believe that teenage addiction is partly caused by different rates of development by different parts of the brain. As kids, we look for cheap thrills and exciting adventures, because that's what kids do, and the part of the brain that stimulates that behavior develops very early and rapidly. When we grow up, we're supposed to put away childish things and make mature decisions, but the part of the brain that allows us to do that develops much more slowly.
And that, the researchers conclude, is one reason adolescents and teenagers are more vulnerable to various addictions than any other age group.
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