use could be peer pressur e and the adolescents’ need to be accepted by the group, or desire to act more like adults, or feel a need to escape the pressure of school work or social activities. The addictive powers of nicotine make it difficult to stop smoking. It has been found that adolescents who are mor e vulnerable to drugs, alcohol, and nicotine use, are impulsive, aggressive, anxious, depressive, and unpredictable, have low self-esteem, and low expectation for achievement. Peer pressure and the need to be with their peer group make the adolescent either go along with their demands to experiment with drugs, alcohol, and smoking or be ridiculed.
Drug use if continued long enough can lead to physiological dependency, i.e. addiction to drugs, alcohol or nicotine may seriously jeopardise the rest of the adolescents’ lives. Positive relationships with parents, peers, siblings, and adults play an important role in preventing drug abuse. In India, a successful anti-drug programme is the Society for Theatre in Education Programme in New Delhi.
It uses street performances to entertain people between to years of age while teaching them how to say no to drugs. The United Nations International Drug Control Programme (UNDCP) has chosen the programme as an example to be adopted by other non- governmental organisations in the region. Eating Disorders : Adolescents’ obsession with self, living in fantasy world and peer comparisons lead to certain conditions where they become obsessed with their own bodies. Anorexia nervosa is an eating disorder that involves relentless pursuit of thinness through starvation.
It is quite common to see adolescents eliminate certain foods from their diets or to eat slimming foods only. The media also projects thinness, as the most desirable image and copying such fashionable image of thinness leads to anorexia nervosa. Bulimia is another form of an eating disorder in which the individual follows a binge-and-purge eating pattern. The bulimic goes on an eating binge, then purges by self-induced vomiting or using a laxative at times alternating it with fasting.
Anorexia nervosa and bulimia are primarily female disorders more common in