Addictions Can Increase During Holidays, Says Local Expert

For most people, the winter holiday season, including Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah and the New Year, is a happy time filled with parties and gatherings with friends and family. For others, this time of year can be a time of loneliness, anxiety and depression, all of which can contribute to addiction.

“The holidays can be a time of heightened emotion about life events and memories of past events, like the loss of a spouse or another important person,” said William Glatt, M.D., Mills-Peninsula’s Medical Director of the Chemical Dependency Department. “It can be a time of great loneliness, which can kindle or increase drug and alcohol addiction.”

Based at the Mills Health Center in San Mateo, Mills-Peninsula’s Chemical Dependency Department is the only medically managed detoxification service on the San Francisco Peninsula, and one of the few Chemical Dependency programs that accepts patients covered by Medicare insurance.

Depression and substance abuse affect people of all ages.  

“Isolation is painful, made even more so when imagery of the Holiday season features happy gatherings of family and friends,” said Dr. Glatt. “This heightened sense of loneliness can drive a person to ‘self medicate’ with drugs and alcohol in an effort to ease their distress. Addictions spike this time of year.”

The medical consequences of drug addiction are many and often serious, including death. This makes it vital that a treatment and rehabilitation be supervised by an addiction medicine physician, because the impact of addiction can be life threatening. Drug abuse can provoke cardiovascular disease, stroke, cancer, lung disease, hepatitis and autoimmune diseases.

Mills-Peninsula Health Services’ Chemical Dependency programs include inpatient (hospital-based) and outpatient (clinical) treatment, acute detoxification, an innovative 28-day rehab program, an intensive 12-week outpatient program and a Relapse Prevention/Stabilization program to ensure participants’ success in ending drug and alcohol abuse.

If you or someone you care about needs help with a drug or alcohol dependency, there is local expert help. For more information about chemical dependency programs or to schedule an assessment at the Mills-Peninsula Health Services’ Chemical Dependency Program, call 650-696-4666 between 8:30 a.m. and 7 p.m. Monday through Friday. On Saturdays, people can call between 10:30 a.m. and 7 p.m.