LETHBRIDGE — Addiction has been a prominent issue in Lethbridge and across the country for the last number of years.
The Community Substance Abuse Awareness Resource Team (CSART) held its National Addictions Awareness Conference at the Coast Hotel in Lethbridge Wednesday, to discuss the impact brain development has when it comes to addiction.
Keynote speaker Nicole Sherren, the scientific director for the Palix Foundation (an Alberta Family Wellness initiative), explained science is showing the environments children grow up in, and the experiences they face, actually set them up for life-course trajectories, whether good or bad.
“Experiences that support children in practicing a lot of pro-social skills, like being able to pay attention, remember, and things like emotional control and problem-solving are all governed by neural circuits in the brain,” Sherren said.
In other words, she suggested when you see someone struggling with addiction, it’s impossible to know at that moment what path they’ve taken in life to get to that point.
“There are other types of experiences that we call toxic stress," Sherren added. "Some other people might call it adversity of adverse childhood experiences that will undermine the developmental process.”
Researchers say those bad experiences create high levels of stress hormones in the body, which persist over a long period of time and weaken the development of core social skills and abilities.
These conferences happen every year, but this time, organizers wanted to dig deeper into the topic of addiction and how it begins.
“We wanted to really highlight the impact of brain development, and an understanding of addiction being more of a brain disorder,” Alberta Health Services health promotion facilitator Chris Windle said.
“To help create some awareness about the different perspectives that addiction has within our community.”
From a scientific perspective, addiction is now thought of as a chronic disorder of the brain.
“That means addiction is inside the body and it’s inside the head. It’s not some sort of external substance that you take that ends up causing a problem. There are a lot of key neural circuits that get dysregulated in addiction, and may already be dysregulated in some people, which makes them more vulnerable to developing these types of issues,” Sherren explained.
Organizers hope that those who attended the conference will share what they learned with friends and colleagues, to keep the conversation going.
“They could take it back to their workplaces and understand how we can approach addiction from a different perspective perhaps, or how does it support the work that we are already doing? Because a lot of good work on that front is being done currently in Lethbridge,” Windle said.
The conference and other events being put on by AHS this week are to promote National Addictions Awareness Week, which runs from Nov. 25 to Dec. 1 in Lethbridge.
