A common belief about high-risk teens is that they use alcohol, drugs and sex to “self-medicate” depressed feelings. But new research based on nearly 13,500 teens contradicts that widely-held notion, showing instead that alcohol, drugs and sex actually lead to depression, not the other way around.The research report, which studied teen subjects for two years in a row, found that depression did not predict risky behaviors in boys and girls. Instead, it found strong evidence that heavy marijuana use and binge drinking increased the likelihood of depression among boys, and that any alcohol, drug or sexual experimentation increased the likelihood of depression for girls.
“Depression is a debilitating disease that can lead to suicide, which is one of the top three causes of teen death,” said Denise Hallfors, Ph.D., the report’s principal investigator. “This study suggests that teen depression may be prevented. Parents, educators and health practitioners now have even more reason to be concerned about teen risk behaviors and to take action about alcohol, drugs and sex.”
Published in the October edition of American Journal of Preventive Medicine, the report is entitled, "Which comes first in adolescence – sex and drugs or depression?" Hallfors is a senior research scientist at PIRE Chapel Hill Center. PIRE (Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation) is a national nonprofit public health research institute, supported primarily by federal and state research and program funds, with centers in seven locations around the country.
The study, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), compared depression with abstinence and with both experimentation and high-risk involvement with alcohol, tobacco, other drugs and sex. To find out whether alcohol, sex and drugs came first, researchers analyzed data to see whether any of these behavior patterns in the first year were more likely to result in depression the next year.
Teens who abstained from sex, alcohol, drugs and tobacco had very low rates of depression the next year, around 4 percent for both boys and girls. Boys who only experimented did not increase their likelihood for depression. Girls who experimented with tobacco, alcohol or drugs were more than twice as likely to be depressed as girls who abstained, and three times more likely if they had sex.
Boys were more likely to be depressed if they were high-risk users: Binge drinkers were 4½ times more likely to be depressed than abstainers and daily marijuana smokers were 3-4 times more likely. The risk of depression for girls increased greatly, from 2 to 11 times greater, in almost all of the high-risk involvement with alcohol, tobacco, other drugs and sex.
To determine whether depression might ever come first, researchers tested large samples of abstainers to determine if there was an onset of risky behaviors in the second year among depressed compared to non-depressed youths. For both boys and girls, results showed that depression almost never predicted any onset of alcohol, tobacco and other drug use or sexual experimentation.
© 2005 HealthNewsDigest.com
