Psychological Effects of Using Anabolic Steroids

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 t...

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...s about our appearance and the way we feel about ourselves. From the way we wear our hair, the clothes we wear, right down to the cars we drive and the homes we live in, we want to be noticed. All these things make us feel better about ourselves. We follow thelatest fashions, styles and trends because we want to fit in and we want acceptance from our peers and society. We spend endless hours and countless numbers of dollars on all sorts of miracle products promising us all the ways to achieve these goals, such as the miracle diet pills and weight loss plans. We are willing to do whatever it takes in order to fit in. Some people are never satisfied with the way they look, even those who use steriods and have those muscular bodies will always want bigger, better and more .If we cannot control our competitive nature, self love, ego and vanity and if society, as a whole, doesn't change the way it demands and rewards the "body beautiful", and if people cannot learn to be the best they can be, physically as well as psychologically, without performance enhancing drugs, there will always be the desire to achieve the perfect body no matter what the physical or psychological cost.