The Psychological Effects of Using Steriods
Uploaded by Admin on Jan 22, 1999
Anabolic Steriods. What are they? Where do they come from? Why are they used? From amateurs to pros, from body builders to football players and every sport in between, Steriods, or "roids" as they are referred to, have been in the circle of athletes since the 1950's. Is it vanity that drives athletes to use steriods? Do they understand the end results from the abuse of "roids"? What psychological effects do steriods have on users?
In order to understand the psychological effects of steriods, you must first understand what steriods are and where they come from. The natural form of steriods is the hormone testosterone, which is produced in males by the testes and adrenal glands and by the adrenal glands in females. The body uses these hormones to combat inflammation, stimulate development of bones and muscles, contributes to the growth of skin and hair and can also influnece emotions. Anabolic Steriods, also known as "juice", are a synthetic version of the hormone testosterone. When taken, either orally or injected, these synthetic steriods fool the body into thinking that testosterone is being produced and therefore the body shuts down functions involving testosterone(Mishra 2). Given the right training stimulus and diet, these steriods enables the user to process protien into muscle fibers at astonishing rates, creating increased muscle size and strength with a drop in body fat (due to an increase in metabolic rate) (Silver 1). They are, in effect, the chemical essence of manliness, pysical power and masculine aggression (Nichols 38).
Synthetic steriods were developed in the 1930's to rebuild and prevent the breakdown of body tissue from disease. In the 1950's, synthetic steriods became popular with athletes because they helped produce this greater-than-normal muscle size and strength, but the abuse of these synthetic steriods has many dangerous physical and psychological effects.
Steriods are fast catching up with antibiotics as the most abused class of drugs prescribed by doctors even though they cannot cure one single condition. All steriods can do is supress the bodies ability to express a normal response. Sometimes suppression will give the body a chance to heal itself, but more often causes permanent damage. Doctors, by law, cannot prescribe anabolic steriods for the purpose of athletic enhancement, and possession of these steriods without a prescription is a felony, but today there are an estimated one million current or former illegal-steriod users in the United States (Nichols 1). So why...