Health and Behavior Interaction

Personal behaviors play a vital role in the health outcomes of an individual. For instance, individuals who engage in behaviors such as smoking have a higher risk of acquiring lung and heart diseases. On the contrary, positive changes in personal behaviors can minimize the rates of chronic illnesses (Hayman, Mahon & Turner, 2002). In this regard, various public health interventions are focused on changing an individual behavior such as smoking. Substance abuse is a serious public health problem because it affects the community and the entire family. Additionally, substance abuse is a common problem among teenagers, which increases their risk for diseases (Hayman, Mahon & Turner, 2002). For instance, cigarette smoking leads to addiction. The brains of teenagers are not fully developed compared to adults, which makes them more susceptible to substance abuse and addiction.

The short-term consequences of drug abuse among the youth are respiratory effects and risk of other drug use while long-term effects include lung problems and heart diseases. The young people begin to use drugs because of peer pressure, environment, curiosity, and advertisement promotion (Hayman, Mahon & Turner, 2002). Most of the friends associate the use of drugs with enjoyment. Studies on the use of drugs show that experimentation on drug use often brings pleasure to teenagers. Therefore, they take drugs to enjoy themselves. Moreover, the majority of youth lives in an environment with high rate of unemployment, poor housing, and lack of resources. In such environment, there is access of drug supply in order to reduce stress and boredom. Furthermore, some young people are curious and they would want to experiment a variety of drugs (Hayman, Mahon & Turner, 2002). Due to many advertisements that promote the use of drugs, especially on television, many young people are lured to start smoking. In such a case, they get addicted and this addiction is only reinforced among the other smokers.

References

Hayman, L., Mahon, M., & Turner, J. (2002). Health and behavior in childhood and adolescence. New York: Springer Pub.