Signs Your Teen or Young Adult Might Be Struggling With Addiction
Written by Chris Beerman, MSW, LCSW, CADC · Last reviewed and updated September 2026
Most parents who contact me about a teenager or a young adult child do not open with a list of symptoms. They open with a sentence like something has been off since around March, and I can't put my finger on it.
That instinct is usually worth more than any checklist, and it is also the hardest thing in the world to act on, because every single warning sign for addiction in someone aged fifteen to twenty-five overlaps with the ordinary business of being that age. Withdrawn, irritable, secretive about the phone, sleeping strangely, short of money — that describes a young person in trouble and it also describes a young person who is fine.
So this is not a list you can score. It is an attempt to give you the same three things a clinician actually uses: which signs are worth weight, which are worth almost none, and what changes at eighteen — because at eighteen almost everything about what you can do changes at once.
Why Checklists Alone Don't Work
The reason a list of signs fails on its own is that it treats each item as evidence. Individually, none of them are.
What carries weight is a pattern with four features:
Change. Not "is secretive" but "became secretive." You are comparing your child to their own baseline, not to some general idea of a well-adjusted twenty-year-old. You are the only person who has that baseline.
Cluster. One thing shifting is life. Sleep, mood, money, friends, and school all shifting inside the same few months is a different kind of event.
Duration. A rough six weeks after a breakup is a rough six weeks. A rough six months that keeps getting rougher is a trajectory.
Direction. The single most useful question is not "how bad is it right now" but "is this the worst it has been, and has each month been worse than the last."
If you have all four, you have something worth acting on even without proof of what is causing it. If you have one, you probably have a nineteen-year-old.
The Signs That Do Carry Weight
The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry groups the warning signs of teenage alcohol and drug use into five areas, and it is a sober list — no drama, nothing exotic.
Physical signs are "fatigue, repeated health complaints, red and glazed eyes, and a lasting cough." Emotional signs are "personality change, sudden mood changes, irritability, irresponsible behavior, low self-esteem, poor judgment, depression, and a general lack of interest." At home, the pattern is "starting arguments, breaking rules, or withdrawing from the family." At school it is "decreased interest, negative attitude, drop in grades, many absences, truancy, and discipline problems." Socially, it is "new friends who are less interested in standard home and school activities, problems with the law, and changes to less conventional styles in dress and music."
The AACAP's first piece of advice about that list is the part most parents skip, and it is the right first step: consult a physician to rule out physical causes of the warning signs. Fatigue, irritability, a drop in grades and a personality change are also what thyroid disease, mononucleosis, sleep apnea, anemia, depression and a concussion look like. Starting with a medical appointment is not naive. It is the fastest way to either find a different answer or narrow the field.
Gambling Looks Nothing Like That
Here is where most articles on this subject will leave you badly prepared, because they were written about substances and then given a title about addiction.
Gambling has no physical signs. There are no glazed eyes, no smell on a jacket, nothing in a drawer, nothing a drug test would find. A young person can lose the entire summer's earnings on a Sunday afternoon and come down to dinner looking exactly like a young person who watched football. This is the single biggest reason gambling problems in this age group get caught late — not because parents are inattentive, but because the thing they were taught to watch for does not exist here.
What you get instead is a money trail and a mood that tracks outcomes:
Money that arrives and leaves in a pattern you can't account for — a paycheck gone in three days, a balance that is always near zero on a Monday
Requests for money that come with a specific, plausible, and slightly urgent story attached
Borrowing from siblings, grandparents, or friends, especially in small amounts from several people
Selling things — a console, a bike, sneakers, in-game items
A phone that is face-down, turned over, or taken to another room specifically during games
Mood that rises and falls with a scoreboard rather than with anything happening in their actual life
Real distress after a loss that is out of proportion to what they say they had riding on it
New accounts: sportsbooks, a brokerage app, a prediction market, a crypto exchange, a skin-trading site
Sudden expertise in the vocabulary — parlays, units, juice, hedging, closing line
Two more things worth knowing about this age bracket specifically. Illinois sports wagering is 21 and over, but prediction-market platforms are regulated as trading rather than gambling and generally accept users at 18 — which means an eighteen-year-old who cannot legally open a sportsbook account in Illinois can legally take positions on the same games somewhere else. And the entry point is often earlier and smaller than a bet: my piece on video game loot boxes covers the randomised in-game spending that a lot of this starts with.
If gambling is the specific worry, the free gambling addiction test on this site is a nine-question screen you can look at yourself to get clearer on what you are seeing, and my guide to talking to your teen about betting covers the conversation in detail.
What Alcohol Actually Looks Like at This Age
Parents tend to watch for daily drinking, because that is what a drinking problem looks like in a forty-five-year-old. That is not the shape it takes at nineteen.
Among young adults aged 18 to 25, the 2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health found that 47.5% had used alcohol in the past month and 26.7% had binge drunk in that period. Roughly a quarter of that age group binge drinks. So frequency alone tells you almost nothing — half their friends are doing some version of this.
What tells you something is what happens around the drinking:
Blackouts, or nights they cannot fully account for, especially more than once
Injuries, lost phones, lost wallets, rides that went wrong
Drinking before going out, alone, to get to a baseline before the social part starts
An intention that keeps failing — "I wasn't going to drink this week" said more than once
Drinking to manage something specific: sleep, anxiety, a shift, a family dinner
Defensiveness that is disproportionate to the question you asked
It continuing after a consequence that should have been enough — a citation, a fight, a scare
The last one is the most diagnostic thing on this page, for alcohol and for gambling both. Most young people who drink heavily and get a genuine fright modulate afterwards for a while. Continuing unchanged after a real consequence is the pattern that separates a bad stretch from something with its own momentum. If drinking is the concern, the free alcohol use test is a starting point.
What Is Not Evidence
Some of what gets read as a warning sign is just adolescence, and treating it as evidence costs you credibility you will need later.
A messy room is not evidence. New friends you do not like are not evidence on their own. One bad semester is not evidence. Moodiness, sleeping until noon on a Saturday, a closed door, a new music taste, wanting less to do with the family — these are developmental, not diagnostic. So is a young person being annoyed that you asked.
And a word about searching. Going through a phone, a room, or a bank account will sometimes give you information, and it will always cost you something. If you are going to do it, do it because you have a specific concern about safety and you have decided in advance what you will do with what you find — not as a substitute for a conversation you are dreading. Searching that turns up nothing does not clear anything, and searching that turns up something has already decided how the next conversation starts. Parents rarely regret asking directly. They frequently regret how the search came out.
Before You Do Anything, Get Your Own Read Straight
This takes twenty minutes and it changes how the rest goes.
Write two columns. On the left, only what you have actually observed — dates, amounts, specific incidents, things you saw or that someone told you they saw. On the right, what you have inferred from it.
Almost everyone discovers three things. The observed column is shorter than they expected. The inferred column contains at least one conclusion that has quietly become a fact in their head. And the observed column, laid out with dates, has a shape to it that was invisible when the events were spread across four months of ordinary life.
That left column is also what a doctor or a therapist can actually use, and it is what makes a conversation with your child about facts rather than about character.
The Line at Eighteen Changes What You Can Do
This is the part that catches people out, and it is worth understanding before you need it.
If they are under eighteen, you can require an evaluation and you can make the appointment. Start with their pediatrician, which is both the least confrontational option and a genuinely useful one: the CRAFFT is a well-validated substance use screening tool for adolescents aged 12 to 21, recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics' Bright Futures guidelines for preventive visits, and most pediatricians already use it. A well visit that includes a real screen is a low-drama way to get a professional read.
One Illinois wrinkle worth knowing. Under the state's Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities Code, any minor aged 12 or older may request and receive counseling or psychotherapy on an outpatient basis — initially limited to not more than eight 90-minute sessions for a minor under 17 before parental consent is required — and the statute provides that a parent shall not be informed of it without the minor's written consent, subject to specific exceptions. In practice that means two things: your teenager has a route to talk to someone that does not run through you, and it is possible they have already used it.
If they are eighteen or older, almost none of that applies. You cannot make the appointment. You cannot be told whether they are seeing someone, because a therapist cannot confirm that a person is a client without written authorization. You cannot get records. If you call a practice about your twenty-two-year-old, the honest answer you will get is that we cannot discuss whether we know them.
What you still have is real, and it is not nothing:
What you fund, and what you stop funding
What the terms are for living at home
Whether you co-sign, lend, or cover a shortfall — my guide to helping without enabling is the long version of that decision
One honest conversation, offered without an ultimatum attached
Your own therapy, which requires nobody's cooperation
That last one is not a consolation prize. It is frequently the thing that changes the situation, because most of what keeps a family stuck at this stage is the parent making high-stakes decisions alone, at night, with incomplete information and a lot of fear.
Why Waiting for Them to Admit It Rarely Works
There is a version of this where you decide to hold off until your child recognises the problem themselves. It is a reasonable-sounding plan, and the data on it is not encouraging.
In the 2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, about 1 in 5 people aged 12 or older with a past-year substance use disorder — 19.3%, or 10.2 million people — received any substance use treatment in the past year. Among adults with an untreated substance use disorder, 95.6% (38.1 million people) did not seek treatment or think they should get it.
That last figure is the whole problem in one number. Not recognising it is not an unusual failure of insight; it is the ordinary case. Which means somebody else usually notices first, and that somebody is very often a parent who spent a long time telling themselves they were probably overreacting.
Where I Fit
I'm Chris Beerman, MSW, LCSW, CADC — an addiction therapist in Chicago, working in person in Logan Square and online throughout Illinois and Minnesota.
My practice is with adults, eighteen and over. If your child is a minor, the right next step is their pediatrician or their school counselor, and an evaluation by a clinician whose practice is built for adolescents — mine is not, and I would rather say so than take the appointment.
If your child is eighteen or older, they are someone I can work with, particularly where gambling, sports betting, trading or alcohol is involved. And if you are the one carrying this — trying to decide what to fund, what to say, whether to wait — you can be my client in your own right, without their involvement or their permission. My page for parents and family covers what that looks like.
Schedule a Free 15-Minute Consultation
The Short Version
No single sign means anything. What means something is change from their own baseline, several areas moving at once, over months, in one direction.
Substance signs are physical and emotional; gambling signs are financial and almost invisible, which is why gambling is usually caught last. Rule out medical causes first. Write down what you actually observed before you decide what it means. And know that at eighteen the practical questions change completely — which is a reason to have the conversation earlier rather than a reason to give up after.
Research and Sources
American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Facts for Families: Teens — Alcohol and Other Drugs.
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Key Substance Use and Mental Health Indicators in the United States: Results from the 2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (2025), and the accompanying young adult data brief.
The CRAFFT (crafft.org), Boston Children's Hospital — validated substance use screening for adolescents aged 12–21; recommended in the AAP's Bright Futures guidelines.
Illinois Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities Code, 405 ILCS 5/3-550.
If You Need Support Right Now
Free, confidential help is available 24/7.
SAMHSA National Helpline — 1-800-662-HELP (4357). Free, confidential treatment referral and information, English and Spanish.
Illinois Helpline for Opioids and Other Substances — 1-833-2FINDHELP. Free and confidential, 24 hours a day.
Illinois gambling helpline — 1-800-GAMBLER. You can also text GAMB to 833234. National problem gambling helpline: call or text 1-800-MY-RESET.
If anyone is in a mental health crisis or thinking about suicide, call or text 988. If someone is in immediate danger, call 911.
This article is general information, not a diagnosis, legal advice, or a substitute for care from a licensed professional who knows your family.