- Rethink Mental Illness - Drugs, Alcohol & Mental Health: This page explains how using drugs and alcohol can affect your mental health. It also explains how you can get help to stop using drugs and alcohol. In this section, ‘drugs’ means recreational drugs, alcohol, or prescription drugs. When someone with a mental illness also uses drugs, doctors call this ‘dual diagnosis’ or ‘co-occurring diagnosis’.
- Change Grow Live - Alcohol and Drugs Advice: If you’re concerned about your drinking or drug use but aren’t sure what steps to take, you can find lots of information and advice here.
- Frank: Find out everything you need to know about drugs, their effects and the law. Talk to Frank for facts, support and advice on drugs and alcohol today.
- The Mix - Drink & Drugs: We’re not your parents so we won’t tell you not to do drugs but we can give you non-judgmental facts and advice about drugs, legal highs and the side effects to allow you to make the right decisions.
- Young Minds - Drugs and Alcohol: Find out how drug and alcohol use can affect mental health and where to find more information and support.
- Royal College of Psychiatrists - Drugs and Alcohol: Information for Young People: This webpage aims to point out the problems with misusing drugs and alcohol, and gives you some ideas about how to avoid falling into doing this.
- Royal College of Psychiatrists - Club Drugs: This webpage looks at the effects of club drugs (or ‘recreational’ drugs), including legal highs.
- Royal College of Pyschiatrists - Cannabis and Mental Health: For Young People: This webpage gives you some basic facts about cannabis and also how it might affect your mental health.
- Staffordshire Treatment and Recovery Service - T3 Stars Young People’s Service: This webpage provides information on a confidential service for young people up to 20 years old in Staffordshire (excluding Stoke-on-Trent) that seeks to help young people make informed choices about their alcohol and drug use, and to raise awareness of all the risks involved.
There are many reasons why someone might use drugs and alcohol. For some it might be as a result of peer pressure or experimenting during teenage years. For others they will try to use it to manage their mental health, believing that it will make them feel better. Whatever you reason for using drugs or alcohol it’s important for you to know that long term use of either will have a negative impact on your physical and mental health. If you want to learn more about how you can help yourself with regards to drugs and alcohol then check out the links below for more information and advice.