Finding commonalities among addictive behaviors and other forms of self-harm

Event Center A & B

As Social Workers, we can play a role helping others in directly preventing and managing some of the U.S.’s major public health issues (e.g. diabetes, substance abuse, alcoholism, tobacco abuse, eating disorders, sex disorders, as well as emotional and mental disorders). Neuroscience research has changed the ways mental health issues are understood and addressed so that addictions are now looked at as a brain disease, and thus, legitimized as a medical condition. There are few studies that focus on the ‘biopsychosocial’ factors that both complement and interact with this neurogenetic understandings (Buchman, Skinner, and Illes, 2010). This research seeks to gather and generate data to begin a long-term comparative study that is based on the co-presence of correlations between substance abuse and self-harming behaviors in order to finds common associations of harm between substance abusers and those with co-occurring disorders. I will use the data from this research to begin a later analysis of bio-psycho-social causations between substance abusers, those with other types of self-inflicting harmful disorders (e.g. those with diabetes from overeating, alcoholism, tobacco use, eating disorders, sex disorders, codependency, etc.).