| Probably the most known psychological and emotional effect that comes along with steroid use includes what is referred to as “roid rage”. This “roid rage” is unprovoked aggression. This aggression is sometimes viewed negatively when it’s shown out of place but it’s also viewed positively when the aggression helps them push harder and compete more strongly in competitions. In fact, oftentimes the studies on roid rage are found to be inconsistent in terms of its affects on the steroid user. More importantly, studies are often taken out of context or uncharacteristically summarized for appropriate sound bytes on the news and other media sources.
One of the major issues with studies of the psychological effects of steroid use is that they often pair up steroid users with non-steroid users. They don’t often take into consideration the personality qualities of the steroid users before they started using steroids – in other words, they don’t look into the possibility that steroid users have a different psychological and emotional make up than those who do not use steroids.
Another barrier of getting accurate results in these studies is the fact that researchers are not ethically able to give study participants the amounts and varieties of steroids that they often take in the “real world”. It’s commonly believed that the effects of steroids are often dose-dependant, that is, the greater the dose of steroids the greater the appearance of given side effects.
Additionally, to make an even playing field for the studies, most participants are required to participate in a given workout regimen, so, again, the studies may not effectively mirror real-life examples. That being said, researchers do try to level the playing field as much as possible when doing these studies and they have come up with results that show that in general, steroid users are often more aggressive, hostile, depressed and irritable than their counterparts who do not use steroids. The other side of that issue, however, is that they don’t know if these were preexisting personality conditions or new conditions due to the steroid use.
In short, what this all means is that there is not, at this point, conclusive evidence that steroids do or do not cause the so-called roid rage that is often talked about in media outlets.
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