Promotion of alcohol on social media as a factor hindering the process of addiction treatment
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12775/QS.2025.40.59584Keywords
alcohol, advertising, marketing, social media, addictionAbstract
Introduction: Alcohol consumption is still high. We can distinguish people who drink heavily, binge drink or people diagnosed with AUD. These people have to fight against unabated temptations during the treatment of their addiction. We decided to check whether exposure to alcohol advertisements in the media actually has a negative impact on the process of treating alcoholism.
Materials and methods: A review of chosen literature from PubMed, and Google Scholar was conducted, using key words including "alcohol", "advertising", "marketing" "social media", "addiction".
Summary: Nowadays, the Internet and its resources seem to make life easier, but they can often put us to the test when we watch advertisements that affect our brain. Unfortunately, more and more alcohol advertisements can be found in the broadly understood media. When advertisements, and especially alcohol advertisements, affect the reward system in the brain in the same way as alcohol consumption itself, people undergoing therapy have to do titanic work to be able to push away these temptations.
Conclusions: The found works on the mechanism of alcohol addiction, as well as the impact of advertisements on human thinking and brain allowed us to conclude that alcohol advertising can indeed hinder the process of treating addiction to this substance. At the same time, we want to emphasize that there is a lack of research that would examine the impact of these advertisements directly on people already in therapy. Despite such extensive knowledge about this disease, there is still a scientific gap, the filling of which would help in the therapy of people addicted to alcohol.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Michał Ziemba, Karolina Ejsmont-Sowała , Dominika Hakało, Marta Ignatiuk-Chilkiewicz , Joanna Kałuska, Katarzyna Nowicka, Wiktor Klimek, Aleksandra Sokół , Klaudia Mościszko, Maria Majewska
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