What I’ve been reading this month (July 2016), from Jim Orford

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Created on Thursday, 28 July 2016 09:04

Written by Jim Orford

I have just read two articles which come from countries which, as far as I know, have not produced research findings of these kinds before. Each of them adds to the accumulation of evidence that living with a close relative who is using substances heavily or excessively has a negative impact on the health and well-being of family members.

The first comes from a group at the School of Psychology, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal. Their study involved 120 ‘informal caregivers of drug and/or alcohol addicts… recruited from therapeutic communities for the treatment of substance addiction and self-help groups for family members of substance addicts’. Over half were parents, a quarter spouses, and three-quarters were women. A feature of the sample was that almost two-thirds of the ‘addicts’ were currently abstinent, half of them abstinent for more than five years. Both depression (the Beck depression inventory) and ‘psychological distress’ (a brief inventory of psychological symptoms) were significantly higher amongst those with currently non-abstinent relatives, a finding that is consistent with those of Rudolph Moos and his colleagues, some years ago in the USA, who found that family members’ distress reduced significantly when their drinking relatives recovered but remained high for those whose relatives did not recover (Moos et al, 1990, Alcoholism Treatment: Context, Process and Outcome, New York: Oxford University Press).

The other paper, reported by a collaborative team from Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, and the Institute of Psychiatry in London (the first author is an AFINet member), appeared five years ago but has only just come to my attention. The special feature of this paper is that it focused on the effects of living with older relatives who drank heavily. It involved nearly 1400 ‘co-residents’ (44% children/children in law; 28% spouses; 23% other family members, 5% others), of residents, all aged 65 and over, living in one area of Santo Domingo. Heavy drinking (21 units or more per week for men and 14 or more for women) amongst that group of older people was significantly associated with co-residents’ psychological morbidity’ (a 20-item scale of symptoms of depression, anxiety, and somatic manifestations of distress) independently of sociodemographic factors, the nature of the relationship (spouse, adult child, etc) and the older person’s level of disability.

Many thanks to Richard Velleman for drawing my attention to both of these interesting papers.

The full references to the papers are:

Soares, A. J., Ferreira, G. and Pereira, M. G. (2016). Depression, distress, burden and social support in caregivers of active versus abstinent addicts, Addiction Research and Theory, DOI: 10. 3109/16066359. 2016. 1173681.

Nadkarni, A., Acosta, D., Rodriguez, G., Prince, M. and Ferri, C. P. (2011). The psychological impact of heavy drinking among the elderly on their co-residents: the 10/66 group population-based survey in the Dominican Republic, Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 114, 82-86.

I shall try and tell you what I’ve been reading every now and again from now on. Do tell us what you’ve been reading too. It needn’t be an academic article. It could be a news item or personal story for example.