General relations among drug use, alcohol use, and major indexes of psychopathology

Relations among measures of trait anxiety, depression, panic, somatization, alcohol use, drug use, and treatment for depression were investigated beca use, typically, studies (a) addressed relations among subsets of only 2 or 3 of the measures and (b) dealt almost exclusively with narrow samples of t he population representing extremes on 1 or 2 of the measures. In this stud y, relations among all 7 measures were assessed with participants represent ing a wide range of scores on all the measures. The 369 participants (155 m en, 214 women) were sampled from the general population. Three replications of the same study consistently yielded hypothesized positive intercorrelat ions among all 7 scales. Factor 1 (Anxiety-Depression) included Trait Anxie ty, Depression, and Panic scales. Factor 2 (Substance Abuse) included Drug Use, Alcohol Use, Treatment for Depression, and Somatization scales. Factor 2 highlighted self-medication as a defining characteristic of somatizers a nd corroborated findings showing that substance abuse is often a precursor to treatment for depression-like symptoms that can be ameliorated with abst inence. Factors 1 and 2 were significantly intercorrelated (r = .41, df = 3 67, p < .05), showing a 17% shared variance in two common groupings of psyc hological dysfunction (anxiety-depression, substance abuse) in the general population. Thus, depending on socioeconomic and demographic variables, a t hird common form of dysfunction in the general population is represented by a combination of anxiety-depression plus substance abuse.