Gender Differences in Psychiatric Symptomatology in Adolescents Attending a Community Drug and Alcohol Treatment Program

Abstract

This study examines mental health symptoms in a cohort of adolescents with substance use disorder (SUD), and attempts to determine if mental health symptoms differed by gender. We retrospectively looked at the Beck's Youth Inventory Second Edition (BYI-II) scores of 88 clients attending a community drug and alcohol treatment service in Dublin, Ireland that were completed at intake as part of their assessment. The raw and T-scores of the male patients were compared against their female counterparts and both against their age- and gender-matched normative population. Participants were 65 boys and 23 girls with a mean age of 16.2 years. Polysubstance use was the norm. As a group, the girls had higher T scores than the boys in all the domains of the BYI-II, and these were statistically significant. Sixty (68%) of the participants had a psychological problem which was moderate or severe in at least one of the five domains. This study found that SUD girls differ from their male counterparts in having both more internalizing and externalizing psychiatric problems. We also note that comorbid psychological problems are not universal. Thus we should avoid a “one size fits all” approach to treatment such as delivering universal self-esteem enhancement interventions to all adolescents with SUD.

Keywords:

• adolescents
• Becks Youth Inventory-II
• gender differences
• substance use disorder