What is Prevention?
According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, prevention helps people develop the knowledge, attitudes, and skills they need to make good choices or change harmful behaviors.
Prevention is one part of the continuum of Mental, behavioral, and Physical health. The other parts are promotion, treatment, and recovery. All are critical elements of a robust behavioral healthcare system, but each one has its own unique role. Promotion supports positive behaviors. Prevention reduces the risk of behavioral health issues. Treatment cares for someone with a diagnosed substance use disorder or mental health illness. And recovery helps people live productive lives after treatment.
Inside the continuum of behavioral health, prevention is universal, selective, or indicated. Universal prevention targets the entire population, such as all students attending a specific school. Selective prevention targets subpopulations that are at increased risk, such as all students of low socioeconomic standing at a specific school. And indicated prevention helps students who are vulnerable to a substance use disorder. Indicated prevention may, for instance, aim to help students who have shown signs of substance abuse but don’t have a diagnosable disorder.
It’s important to know that prevention is different from harm reduction. Harm reduction seeks to minimize or remove the consequences of drug misuse while prevention aims to stop drug misuse from occurring. Harm reduction is not prevention.
Factors of Prevention
Like many diseases, no two addictions are alike. While everyone is susceptible to addiction, there are certain risk and protective factors that influence a person’s likelihood of becoming addicted. These factors can each be further divided into three more categories—individual, environmental, and genetic.
Individual factors include whether a parent misused drugs, a history of trauma, and a lack of social attachment. Environmental factors include the availability of drugs in the area, exposure to violence, and community poverty. Genetic factors include a family history of substance use disorder and can account for about half of a person’s likelihood of developing an addiction. For each risk factor, there is a corresponding protective factor.
According to NIDA, risk and protective factors include:
Risk Factors Protective Factors
Aggressive behavior in childhood Good self-control
Lack of parental supervision Parental monitoring and support
Drug experimentation Positive relationship
Availability of drugs at school Anti-drug policies at school
Community poverty Neighborhood resources
Strategies for Prevention
There are six strategies for primary prevention activities, according to SAMHSA’s Center for Substance Abuse Prevention. They are:
- Information dissemination – provides awareness and knowledge of the nature and extent of drug misuse and its effects.
- Education – communicates to improve the life and social skills of participants. This is different from information dissemination because the teacher and participants interact with each other.
- Alternatives – provides activities that don’t include drugs, including alcohol and tobacco, in hopes that participants will have their needs met without resorting to drugs.
- Environmental – establishes or changes community standards, codes, and attitudes to influence the misuse of drugs in a community.
- Community-based process – enhances the ability of the community to provide prevention and treatment services.
- Problem identification and referral – identifies people who have initiated drug misuse to assess if their behavior can be changed through education. As a prevention activity, this does not refer people to treatment but provides intervention before treatment is needed.
A Word on Scare Tactics
Scare tactics emphasize the worst dangers of drug use to create fear and anxiety in the hopes that fear alone will prevent or stop risky behaviors. Scare tactics seem intuitive to us as adults. After all, we intentionally avoid situations that frighten us or make us worry that we’ll be harmed.
Accordingly, a lot of prevention has been built around making drug use seem as frightening and harmful as possible. Mock car crashes, gruesome scenes, images of people before and after drug addiction, graphic depictions of death and drug use, auditorium speakers who share how drug use ruined their lives, videos of dead, drunk drivers being scraped off the road, and other frightening messages are all scare tactics. Unfortunately, despite all the creativity, energy, and money spent on these tactics, research has consistently shown that scare tactics don’t work in preventing substance misuse.
Learn more about the use of scare tactics in prevention messaging, including why it doesn’t work and what you can do instead.
Prevention and Adolescents
Adolescence is a time of transition, and transitions increase the risk of drug misuse. When a teenager moves homes, suffers a divorce in the family, or changes schools, they are more likely to seek out drugs as a coping tool. They also face greater stressors than they did in elementary school, and they are more likely to engage in risky behaviors, like misusing drugs than adults.
The harmful effects of drug misuse are also greater for adolescents. Their brains are still developing, and that makes teens’ brains more likely to be disrupted by drug use. In fact, the earlier someone misuses drugs, the more likely they are to become addicted to them. Of those who have an addiction, or substance use disorder, 90% of them began using drugs under the age of 18.
Because of these risks, prevention is the best strategy for addressing addiction, according to NIDA. There are many evidence-based programs that have been proven to improve the protective factors and to minimize risk factors for drug use in adolescents.
Learning is the first step to playing your role in preventing substance misuse.
Drug misuse comes with a host of negative, short- and long-term effects. It can lead to lung cancer, psychosis, mental health issues, HIV/AIDS, hepatitis, heart attack, overdose, and addiction. Addiction compels people to seek out drugs despite any negative consequences that might be incurred. As a disease, it hijacks the brain to create an intense craving for the addictive drug or behavior. That craving can override other thoughts and needs in the brain, including desires to care for an infant, build and maintain healthy relationships, work, have fun, take care of oneself, and protect oneself from harmful situations. It changes how you think and how you behave.
By contrast, prevention helps people develop the knowledge, attitudes, and skills they need to make healthy choices about drugs, and it aims to delay or completely avoid the misuse of drugs. It builds up you, your family, and your community so that all can thrive without the harmful effects of substance misuse. In fact, prevention has been touted by the National Institute on Drug Abuse as the best strategy for addressing addiction.
Here, we’ve collected a variety of resources to help you understand prevention, addiction, various substances, and more. Each of these resources contains key information about its topic, references to high-quality research and reports, resources to support further learning, or more. You’re welcome to not only read them but to share them widely with friends, family, and members of your community.
Widely used or misused substance in different categories
Children and young adults-Stimulants such as tobacco related products, e cigarrates, Ice, Crystal Meth
Tramadol (Narcotic Opioids), for high euphoric feeling
Reason: Hyper disorders due to child hood Environmental stress lack of parenting skills, lack of teacher skills, peer pressure lack of information and education, genetic predisposition and ,Fun ,Internet Gaming, sports, non-prescribe medication anabolic-androgenic steroids issued in fitness centers.
Adults: vastly its alcohol and nicotine in in parallel l with cannabis (KG) local ganja.
Also heroin and Ice among lower middle class middle class and upper middle class.
Upper middle class: Mixture of alcohol, Cocaine, Ice (Malaysian version) and Club Drugs mostly hallucinogens and other club drugs.
Women in addiction
From recent years srilanka experience a drastic increase in women addiction t it has many factors such as the masculinity, gender violence, domestic violence, psycho socio economic a l differences and the amount of domestic pressure and work place pressure and harassment
Until recently, gender differences in substance abuse habits were not recognized. But thanks to modern science, we now know that:
- Women become addicted to drugs after using smaller doses and for shorter periods of time than men.
- Women can be more sensitive to the effects of certain drugs because of sex hormones.
- Women who use drugs experience different changes in their brains than men do.
- A woman’s menstrual cycle could affect her withdrawal symptoms and likelihood of relapse in addiction recovery.
- Women are more likely to experience anxiety or depression when using certain substances than men is.
- Women are more likely to die from an overdose of certain drugs than men are.
- Women can experience more physical effects from drug use than men.
No precise center, rehab, group, organization, so far has come forward to assist the women in addiction.
Cultural, social, ethnic geographical issues are hindering women to come forward and claim addiction and recover.
Urgent attention
The Global Training and research Center has identifies srilanka is paying more attention on supply reduction should equally pay attention to demand reduction
- All the stake holders’, government and Non-government should come under one umbrella especially in awareness programs and also seek assistance of private organization’s dedicated for Drug prevention along with all other government organization..
- Building up a national code of Ethics in Drug awareness which includes media.
- Identify Addiction is a medical or Psychological Problem, health issue as well as a behavioral and introduce behavior modification programs.
- Amend the policies in Addiction Treatment in Prisons/Government Rehabilitation Centers as well as private rehabilitation and more attention/supervision/regulations/national Policy in addiction Treatment.(voluntary and Involuntary Consent )
- Set up Separate wards in Hospitals rather than putting them in the psychiatric wards for detoxification.
- More Training and knowledge to social service officers who can visit people recovering in addiction.(Coordination with GS)
- Giving more knowledge and training to grassroots primary health care professionals (Midwifes) to give primary advice in prevention and addiction treatment since they are more close to the families in villages.
- Set up primary crises intervention centers in all religious worship organizations /divisional secretariat/police station (trained).set up a like skill programs in Dhama pasala. Sundays School and etc.
- Setting of a presidential task force to monitor all the stake holders in national level.
- Having few more branches of NDDCB or giving authority to private organizations under strict giddiness of a government body.
Eradication of Drugs is having a standard prevention and a Treatment program
Nishal Perera(JP )PhD.(Hon )Psy Msc ,Addpsyc, PgD add Psyc Msc in Psycht .ICAP RC FSRSPH MBRS MCIBT
Global Training and research center
Addiction Specialist
Global Trainer on Drug and Alcohol addiction
Internationally Certified Life skill developer
0718934780/077252449/0113500354