Is It Just Low Self-Esteem?

Many people in active addiction or in early addiction recovery have low self-esteem. Is it just low self-esteem, or is there something else going on also?

Just about every aspect of intoxication, withdrawal, and recovery can be mimicked and mirrored by some corresponding mental health issue or diagnosis.

For example, a person who is high and cocaine can look exactly like somebody who is bipolar and having a manic episode. When a person is on downers, it can look just like a person who has severe depression, and so on.

Depending on whose statistics you’re looking at, it is estimated that up to 70 percent of people with chemical dependency problems also have another co-occurring mental health diagnosis, such as depression, anxiety, or disordered eating, for example.
Therefore, we want to be careful that low self-esteem is not covering up the existence of clinical depression. In fact, one of the diagnostic criteria for depression is low self-esteem.

Before you begin to consider strategies and activities to help raise your self-esteem, it is important to remember that low self-esteem may do be due to depression. Low self-esteem is a symptom of depression. To make things even more complicated, the depression may be a symptom of some other illness.

Have you felt sad consistently for several weeks but don’t know why you are feeling so sad?

For example, nothing terribly bad is happened, or maybe something bad is happened but you haven’t been able to get rid of the feelings of sadness?

Is this accompanied by other changes, like wanting to eat all the time or having no appetite, wanting to sleep all the time or waking up very early in not being able to get back to sleep?

If you answered yes to these questions, there are two things you may want to do:

1. See your doctor for a physical examination to rule out physical causes.
2. Determine the existence, if any, and extent of your depression and discuss treatment choices.

There are some things that will help you to feel better right away like:
•    Start eating well
•    getting plenty of exercise in outdoor light,
•    spending time with good friends, and
•    doing fun things like going to a movie, painting a picture, playing a musical instrument, or reading a good

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