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 because, typically, studies (a) addressed relations among subsets of only 2 or 3 of the measures and (b) dealt almost exclusively with narrow samples of the population representing extremes on 1 or 2 of the measures. In this study, relations among all 7 measures were assessed with participants representing a wide range of scores on all the measures. The 369 participants (155 men, 214 women) were sampled from the general population. Three replications of the same study consistently yielded hypothesized positive intercorrelations among all 7 scales. Factor 1 (Anxiety-Depression) included Trait Anxiety, 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 and corroborated findings showing that substance abuse is often a precursor to treatment for depression-like symptoms that can be ameliorated with abstinence. Factors 1 and 2 were significantly intercorrelated (r = .41, df = 367, p < .05), showing a 17% shared variance in two common groupings of psychological dysfunction (anxiety-depression, substance abuse) in the general population. Thus, depending on socioeconomic and demographic variables, a third common form of dysfunction in the general population is represented by a combination of anxiety-depression plus substance abuse.