Mental Health Symptoms Among Street-Based Psychostimulant Injectors in Sydney's Kings Cross

Abstract

Urban frontline services have recorded increases in psychostimulant-related presentations. A convenience sample of 183 street-based psychostimulant injectors recruited in April was administered the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K10) to assess psychological distress. Homelessness, unemployment, and recent public injection, along with gender (female) and financial and relationship problems, best predicted clinically significant K10 scores. Drug use measures were not significantly associated with distress once indicators of social marginalization were included. The risk environment of the street-based drug market accounts for much of the distress experienced in this milieu, highlighting the need for broad structural interventions, together with drug-specific responses.

Keywords :

• mental health
• street drugs
• drug-related harm
• risk-taking
• methamphetamine
• cocaine
• substance abuse
• intravenous
• substance-related disorders

THE AUTHORS

Lisa Maher is a Program Head at the National Centre in HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research, NHMRC Senior Research Fellow and Professor in the School of Public Health and Community Medicine at the University of New South Wales. Her research focuses on ethnographic and epidemiological studies of drug use and related harms and clinical trials of behavioural and biomedical interventions designed to prevent infectious disease.

Libby Topp has worked as a researcher and clinician in the drug and alcohol field since 1994, and in 1998, completed her PhD on meth/amphetamine dependence at the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre. She is currently a Senior Research Officer at the Centre for Health Research in Criminal Justice at Justice Health, where she maintains her interest in injecting drug users, comorbidity and hepatitis C transmission and prevention.

Susan L. Hudson is a PhD candidate with UNSW whose thesis is an ethnographic study of women who inject psychostimulants and engage in street-based sex work in Kings Cross, Sydney. Susan is also the current manager of the Stimulant Treatment Program at St Vincent's Hospital in Sydney.