Addiction

The increasing effects of alcohol in college in causing depression and other negative results were studied in this research to examine whether a form of intervention can help to prevent. It was specifically located on web-based intervention and screening to help students understand if they are suffering depression and its association to alcohol use. This topic is definitely important because it has become such a strong issue for college to be easily represented as involving parties that always has drinking going on along with wild behavior. This practice can unknowingly lead to an addiction and be cause or result of mild to severe depression with using alcohol as a wrongful choice in treatment. Unfortunately, it is a huge influence with people in college because of many factors such as media’s portrayal, addicted peers, or the positive reputation it has in the college community. However, alcohol addiction and linked depression commonly is associated with a level of mental illness and drawbacks that can be helped in preventing or treating. This study shows several new approaches that can target students that are dealing with both problems or either only alcohol/depression without the other associated. The article mentions, “many preventions exist to help college student drinking…fewer are available, for depressed mood…relatively fewer are found for those both heavy drinkers and depressed.” The data shown from evidence assumes that the research and preventative measures are necessary in the current arising problems that are present in colleges everywhere.

The study examined certain interventions by the cost, reachability and result-effectiveness it had with specific problems. The preventions specifically discussed are brief interventions for comorbid alcohol use and depressed mood and web-based approaches as part of a stepped-care model to attempt. The experiment is divided into four conditions of “eligibility criteria of alcohol only, depressed mood only, integrated, and referral-only control,” to see which prevention method was overall most effective. The current study took thousands of diverse college students that could best represent the college community to take part in web-based personalized intervention. The ideal college student each “reported an AUDIT score of 8 or more, a BDI-II score of 14 or more, and reported drinking four (women) or five (men) or more drinks on at least one occasion in the past month.” Significant effects were not necessarily found in the results but obvious improvement was found with greater reduction to alcohol-related problems towards students with initial low levels of depression or alcohol-based consequences. Students who started with intense severity with their problem resulted in lower positive effect from interaction with web-based interventions as treatment. The results were contrary to the primary hypothesis and other studies have concluded no improvement to negative consequences even when reduction in alcohol intake was apparent. Also, mixed results from previous studies have shown “no significant differences on any alcohol outcomes.” This has contributed in finding that it is hard to indicate the correlation between these problems and the positive affect an improvement in one can lead to another. Personally, I don’t see that everyone that forms an alcohol problem will view the matter as an issue or factor in influencing depression or will clinically suffer from or is suffering depression due to the drug. It is not easy to accurately identify the correct data since depression also includes denial of symptoms, which makes it difficult to calculate who has a disease when they don’t believe it themselves to announce they have a problem.