How does addiction affect high school students (15-18 years old) Essay

How does addiction affect high school students (15-18 years old) grades or school performance - Essay Example tained by them are also influenced by the factors like setting proper priorities, maintaining pleasing attitudes and demonstrating acceptable behavioral practices. And., it is reported that the proportion of students that falls in the above category is only 40 % of the school population (Nelson et al, 2001). It is equally surprising that atleast a quarter of the high school leaving children felt unhappy and supportless and another 15 percent have the history of either attempting or committing suicide (Nelson et al, 2001). A closer introspection clearly reveals that the contributory factors for such disturbing situations are tobacco addiction, alcohol abuse, wide variation in the mental state like depression and bipolar disorder, unbearable loss of loved one, humiliation and easy access to very lethal systems (Nelson et al, 2001). Among these, addiction to tobacco is found to be the easiest trap to which students easily fell due to the easiness in availability of the products and rela tively lower social stigma attached to this habit when compared to others in the list. Thus this research study is undertaken with the objective to investigate how the academic performance in schools are affected as a result of addiction, more specifically to tobacco smoking. A research study carried out among a set of school children have given wide ranging reasons for getting addicted to the tobacco products, mostly for smoking (Dongre et al, 2008). It says that nearly 50 percent of the students succumb to smoking in school due to the peer pressure. The next contributing factor is for curiosity to explore the â€Å"pleasures† in the process. A small fraction of students, about 8 percent, resort to tobacco claiming it to have a curative value (Dongre et al, 2008). Another research conducted to understand the psychosocial predictors in the onset of the tobacco smoking shows a strong relationship with four different factors. These are categorized as social and interpersonal