Abstract
The authors administered a package containing some smoking-related questions and a psychiatric inventory, the Symptom Checklist (SCL-90), to 564 young women students (14–17years old) to obtain information on the strength of the association between smoking and psychological distress in women smokers. Somatization, anxiety, hostility, and paranoid ideation scores were higher in teenage women smokers than in nonsmokers. Smokers generally have higher levels of minor psychiatric disturbance, but the data show that these symptoms are already present among young women at the start of their smoking careers.