Psychological Effects of Alcohol

Alcohol is a highly addictive substance that can carry with it numerous short- and long-term effects. While it can be physically damaging to your health, it can also be mentally damaging to your psyche. If you or someone you love has a problem with alcohol, learn a little more about the mental ailments and ramifications of this dangerous addiction.

Short Term Effects

• Short-term effects of alcohol, say from one night of drinking with friends, can range from slurred speech, difficulty balancing, impaired decision making, lowered inhibitions and memory loss, depending on how many drinks you've had. Blackouts are also a short term result of drinking and occur when a person drinks alcohol quickly and their blood alcohol level raises swiftly, resulting in a black out or memory loss of events that took place when drinking.

Depression

• Another effect of alcohol on the psyche is that it can lead to depression, or greatly increase symptoms in a person diagnosed with depression. Symptoms of depression can include fatigue, feelings of sadness, worthlessness, and negative feelings about the future. Alcohol works as a depressant on your central nervous system and lowers serotonin levels in your brain. Serotonin is responsible for producing happy emotions in your system, and in depressed people serotonin levels are low, so as levels deplete with ongoing drinking, depression can be caused or worsened overtime. A danger that this carries is that the more depressed a person may get, the more they may drink to numb their feelings, underhandedly increasing the severity of their depression.

Anxiety

• Much like depression, alcohol can also lead to serious anxiety issues, especially in a person diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. Alcohol can cause or increase anxiety by depressing the nervous system and leading to irritation and fatigue. Often the hangover effect caused by drinking alcohol can increase feelings of anxiety as a person is agitated and generally not feeling well. Excessive alcohol consumption can also increase heart rate and blood pressure, a physical aspect that can lead to greater anxiety and panic attacks.

Brain Function

• Overtime, with heavy drinking, alcohol has also been found to lower the cognitive functions of your brain such as ability to learn new information and remember things in the short- and long-term. Reasons for this include the fact that alcohol kills brain cells, which don't regenerate, and overtime the more you lose the lower your brain's ability to function. In some cases, depending on length and severity of drinking, brain function can be recovered or improved if a person quits drinking alcohol.

Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome

• Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome is a severe brain disorder in which the brain has a thiamine deficiency, which is often a result of long-term heavy drinking. The syndrome consists of two phases which are Wernicke's encephalopathy and Korsakoff's psychosis. WKS causes poor coordination, muscle movement, confusion, an inability to learn and remember things and disorientation. While early stages can be treated with administration of thiamine, if left untreated it can lead to a permanent condition that can cause coma or death.