Alcohol or drug addiction happens when a person develops a habit of using a specific substance. It becomes severe or a severe substance-use disorder, when that habit negatively impacts day-to-day living. Things like relationships, school, work. And one way to think about it is, when a person has a happy and healthy life, everything is balanced out, all of the pieces of their life. With addiction or substance-use disorder, the drug use becomes the center of their life and everything else is secondary and suffers as a result.

Addiction actually rewires our brain. It changes the way that our cells communicate with each other and how they process information. That rewiring causes us to make different types of decisions, often not good decisions.

Parts of our brains make up what we call “the reward system.” We get rewarded with good feelings when we do something we like, such as eating cookies or hanging out with friends. When we experience something enjoyable, our brain releases a reward, a chemical called “Dopamine.” Dopamine creates that positive feeling. When we do that with drugs, however, our bodies or our brains produce a much larger amount of dopamine and overwhelms our systems. Our brains then squash down the amount of dopamine that they're providing. So, it is always trying to keep it at a normal level. And, eventually, our bodies stop creating dopamine in the appropriate levels. And that's what causes a person to use more drugs, because they're always trying to get back to that positive feeling.

Drug and alcohol addiction doesn't discriminate. It can be a professional, it can be somebody who's homeless. It can be somebody with mental illness, somebody without mental illness. It can impact anyone.