Abstract
Mental disorders are serious neuropsychiatric diseases that affect the development of daily life of the person who suffers and during the last decades the number of affected has increased. In these cases, pharmacological treatment is an essential and necessary therapeutic tool. However, problems associated with these treatments, such as addiction, have been described after their use. Interestingly, these pharmacological treatments against mental disorders could improve other types of pathologies, as occurs in the mental illness of addiction. The objective of this work is to analyze the most recent scientific literature in relation to the problem of addiction to legal drugs, mainly anxiolytics and antidepressants, as well as the possible therapeutic use of these for the treatment of addictions. For this, an exhaustive search was carried out in the main scientific databases, selecting the most recent articles that use the keywords that interest us and that are published in the last 5 years. The data points to the great problem of consumption of legal drugs but also to a possible similarity in their mechanism of action between addiction to substances of abuse and mental problems, so that some drugs against mental problems could be used as a pharmacological tool in the addiction to substances.
Highlights
Mental illness affects a large percentage of the population
Many of the people affected are susceptible to developing other pathologies, being an example of this, the addiction generated after the excessive consumption of these legal drugs, speaking of dual pathology [2,3]
The result was that aprazolam at high doses increases the subjective effects of lower doses of methamphetamine, but has no effect on cocaine discrimination, showing that alprazolam differentially affects the effects of discriminative stimulation of methamphetamine and cocaine
Summary
Anxiety is one of the disorders that appears in our society with greater prevalence. It can be defined as a state of tension, produced by an anticipation of damage or danger that in the immediate future and sometimes accompanied by a feeling of dysphoria [1]. Our heart beats faster, more glucose reaches our muscles to be able to run, etc All this is the result of the activation of our sympathetic nervous system that guarantees our survival [8]. If this situation of tension and physiological activation is maintained over time, problems begin to appear due to the release of cortisol maintained in our body [8]. Severely damage our body and even interfere with other biological systems, such as the immune system [9] It is when we talk about maladaptive anxiety because it does not allow the person to adapt to the situation and guarantee survival, but otherwise, it hinders the activities of daily life (anxiety before exams, social anxiety ...) (Table 1).
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