May Editorial - Addiction As We Don’t Know It

It’s half past 12 and the school is desperately waiting for the bell to ring. Jittery fingers, sweating forehead, violent shaking, all this quite abnormal for Arnold to show. His eyes as red as the teacher’s marker, his body as warm as the afternoon sun. RRRRIIIIIIINNG!!! Picking up his Gucci backpack and racing for the door, things really don’t sound gucci here! While everyone talks to their best buds, he runs forth the gate into his little apartment, throws his bag and locks his room. He slowly opens the drawer, picks up a rolled paper and 1,2,3… Arnold is now as silent as a log, his face muscles relax like melting butter. His arms stop shaking and he lies on his bed peacefully.

Arnold is one of 20 million teenagers who have fallen into the black hole of substance abuse. It’s hard to tell someone has it just by looking at them. But you can make out if they have one if you see them in a corner of a playground and crying when they see other kids smiling and enjoying. Debates, articles, movies, videos and what not, have come about telling the world that 'Substance Abuse' is something that should not be taken lightly. But why do we still find parents burying their children who they lost to drugs? Why do we still find rehabs with more than 40% of their occupants being children aged 14-18 years?

The answer to these questions is not as simple as it may seem, and neither is the solutions to these problems. Researchers all across the world finally understood the root cause of the problem. In fact, we had it all wrong. We never really understood the full thing ourselves, as if we were the ones drunk to observe the reality!

Every year a 1000 teenagers fall prey to this evil, not because of bad influence or attraction to these substances, but because they are not happy with their lives and they feel they can better it by taking a puff. Teenagers, as we know them, are more complicated than they sound and when we don’t understand them, they can’t take it. Teens all across the world are suffering from innumerable mental health issues, the scary part, you don’t know a thing about it! Their lives have become too complex to live in and they see no ray of hope. They never fall prey to addiction, but they surrender to it. Things such as separation of parents, losing someone and so on are commonly heard things that lead to it. But have we ever thought about academic pressure, body shaming and stigmatizing as causes? In fact, do we know that they are the primary causes for it?

It’s pretty clear now that who’s the one at fault. So how do we deal with this? How do we keep our teens happy and stop them from resorting to all this? Quite surprisingly, the best possible method we have now is to just talk to them. Don’t tell them that they’re too young for all this. Try to understand their pains and tell them that they are not alone. A hero can be anyone, even if it’s a man doing something as simple as putting a scarf around a young boy and reassuring him that world has not ended. Be their hero and make them feel special for being alive, because the world needs them and because you need them, and when you see their frown turn into a smile and a subsequent hug, you know, it’s time to watch a movie with them 😊.

Written by -

Aaryan Sinha

12-H