Throughout the current pandemic of COVID-19, we experience a unique situation of mental ordeal deriving from applied restrictive measures such as quarantines and social distancing.

This freedom deprivation contradicts one of our most fundamental characteristics as people – that we are social beings.

This can lead to major issues of tension, stress, feelings of loneliness, discomfort and depression. In certain situations, feelings of loneliness can affect a person’s appetite, sexual libido and can greatly affect sleep patterns which are behaviors that intensify the need for remedial action.

Unfortunately, lack of social interaction and feelings of mental exhaustion can cause some individuals to seek methods to satisfy or balance their mood through the use of substances (legal or not).

One of the substances that are usually the get to drug to satisfy this urge is alcohol because it is widely available, legal and easily can be reassuring by most.

Using alcohol though in order to avoid emotional drawbacks such as stress and/or to compensate for your lack of sleep can be considered troublesome. In such cases alcohol is considered to be used medicinally but alcohol is not considered a reliable medicine for most cases. Alcohol can increase tolerance levels of an individual to ethanol and this in the long term will require from that person to consume more and more quantities of alcohols to receive the same satisfactory result.

For this reason, it is very easy for an individual to metastasize from the use of alcohol to abusing alcohol consumption and lastly to alcohol dependency.

Throughout the last six months of our clinical practice, it would seem that the continuous psychological trauma individuals endure throughout this pandemic has caused relapses to alcohol dependency in some cases.

Naturally, is difficult to recognize borderline characteristics of alcoholism within our clinic for young people that use alcohol to endure their stress levels due to the reason that physical and mental issues from the use of alcohol require time to emerge.

Furthermore, we did not mentioned any details regarding the misuse of other substances such as cannabis, crystal meth and cocaine which it would seem that users also experience drastic increase in usage similar to that of alcohol consumption in this time period.

The primary solution for promoting preventive measures remains the contact with general practitioners and the interest they maintain to help patients on developing coping strategies in order to manage these novel stressful circumstances. This can be the stepping stone and can serve as a saving act for many of our fellow people.

Additionally, the vigilance from relatives, acquaintances and friends can prevent the worst case scenario for people around them, who have found substance misuse as a solution to withstand their anxiety and depression.

Friendly interventions that promote rapport and understanding can help prevent relapse and use of substances for the management of troublesome emotions and specific assistance can be offered in case of more complicated cases.