Brielle Buss

Capstone Project Reference Page

25, M. (2022, May 25). How an addicted brain works. Yale Medicine.
https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/how-an-addicted-brain-works
This website was useful to me because it explained briefly how the brain works and how addiction
affects it. This website talks about dopamine in specific, which is mentioned multiple times
throughout my documentary. The website explains that the brain has a reward circuit and
develops ways to allow humans to survive. The website uses eating as an example and how the
brain knows we need food to survive, our brain tells us when we need to eat. When someone
becomes addicted to a drug or substance, that means the brain has changed. It gets used to only
feeling pleasure when the drug or substance is present in the body. Much like eating, the brain
believes we need this drug or substance to survive. At the end of the article, the author suggests
addiction is a psychological disease.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (2022, March 22). Drugs and the brain. National
Institutes of Health. https://nida.nih.gov/publications/drugs-brains-behavior-science-
addiction/drugs-brain
I found this website to be extremely useful for what I was looking for. The article explains the
brain's basic functions and how important it is to the rest of the human body. It suggests that
addiction is life-threatening and can cause permanent alterations to the brain. This website goes
through the step by step of how neurons and neurotransmitters work. This was information I
didn’t expect to use in my documentary, but realized it was a crucial part to how the brain sends
and receives signals. When drugs are consumed often, this is when it can mess up the way
neurotransmitters send signals normally. This website also covers the specific parts of the brain
that are affected by addiction. This is what I was looking for. I wanted to know which parts were
directly interfered with at the presence of drugs. This is the website where I gathered most of my
information from. This was one of the most useful sites I used to contribute to the final product
of my capstone project.

Moore, | Jim. (2021, December 12). Calgary Dream Centre. https://calgarydreamcentre.com/statistics-

on-addiction-in-canada/
Although I did not gather much information from this website, I still found it to be useful
because it provided extra facts and knowledge for me to interpret. It informed me that roughly
21% of the Canadian population is affected by addiction in some way. That is about 6 million
people who will be affected by addiction at some point in their lifetime. This website also
provided me with a list of the top addiction's individuals suffer from in Canada. The number one
addiction is gambling. I knew gambling was the most popular addiction before I conducted any
 research, but it still surprises me. This website was very useful for statistics and numbers, but I
did not end up including as many stats as I figured I would originally.

professional, C. C. medical. (n.d.). Addiction. Cleveland Clinic.

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/6407-addiction
This website provided descriptions of what addiction is and how it works. I used this information
to include it in my introduction and first section of my documentary. This website gave me a
clearer understanding of what addiction is. It taught me that addiction is in fact a lifelong illness
and although recovery is possible, once an addict, always an addict. This website explained the
two different types of addiction, behavioral addictions and substance addictions. Although this
was good information, it wasn’t relevant to my project because I was focusing on substance
addictions only. It was mentioned that individuals can suffer from behavioral addictions, but I
did not go in depth about it because my focus was how drugs and alcohol affect someone.

What is a typical day in drug rehab like?. Addiction Center. (2024, January 3).
https://www.addictioncenter.com/rehab-questions/typical-day-rehab/
I pulled useful information from this website such the typical day in rehab. I wanted to talk about
treatment options in depth because it is beneficial knowing there are solutions to every problem,
even something as intense as addiction. I described what a day in rehab would look like and what
individuals are expected to do while they’re there. This was useful information to me because I
wanted to explain how addicts are coached back to health by medical professionals and therapists
within the workplace. The recovery process is long and time consuming, many addicts relapse
before they can maintain sobriety for longer periods of time.

Sending and receiving messages - module 3 - national institute on drug ... (n.d.).
https://nida.nih.gov/sites/default/files/mod3.pdf
With the information from this website, I could see diagrams and pictures of neurons which
helped me better understand. This article was about how signals in the body and brain are sent
and received while under the influence. I only used the first few parts of the article as the last
half was not relevant to my capstone project. It was important for me to know how neurons work
in a more descriptive way so I could explain it in my documentary. Not much of this information
was used in my documentary, it was more for my personal understanding. I did not take notes off
this website either.