Asociación entre los estados de ánimo negativo, el consumo de sustancias psicoactivas y el bullying en adolescentes escolarizados

Abstract

Objective: mental health problems during adolescence lead to increased morbidity and mortality. We intend to test the hypothesis that bullying and addictive substance use is related to negative mood states. Methods: We carried out a cross-sectional study among high school students in Burela (Northern Spain) (n=238). "Negative mood state" was defined as experiencing the following: feeling tired, sad, out of place, bored, hopeless, nervous or lacking sleep. Independent variables were binge drinking, having smoked tobacco or cannabis, and the corresponding perceived risk of using them. The variable bullying was also measured. Poisson regression models with robust variance were estimated, and Prevalence Ratios were obtained. Results: 10.5% [CI 95% (7.2-15.2)] of the students reported suffering negative mood states. Students declaring low perceived risk of cannabis use [PR = 2.6 (1.2-5.5)], having tried this addictive substance at some point [PR = 3.1 (1.1-8.9)] and having suffered bullying [PR = 4.8 (2.4-9.6)] increased the risk of experiencing negative mood states. Conclusion: It would be advisable to design and implement interventions aimed at improving mental health during adolescence which account for the use of addictive substances and being a victim of bullying.

Contextual Determinants in Alcohol, Tobacco and Cannabis Consumption, Mood and Bullying during Adolescence

“…In our study, Catalonian students had lower prevalence of bullying but higher prevalence of negative mood than Galician students. This contradicts findings from previous studies carried out with Galician students, which concluded that negative mood is associated with bullying [31]. This difference could stem from the multicultural characteristics of this population, where we hypothesize that students from Burela who participated in our study differ culturally from the participants of earlier studies.…”

“…This could explain why no differences appeared in cannabis consumption in the multivariate analyses. On the other side, a higher socioeconomic level is known to contribute to increased substance consumption [31]. In our study, although the Catalonian and Galician (Burela) municipalities have similar personal income tax (PIT), Catalonian adolescents had a higher FAS, probably due to scale characteristics and cultural reasons and, thus, this could have induced the differences in cannabis consumption.…”

“…On the one hand, this observation could be provoked by other determinants with more influence on the decision to try cannabis such as social network (peers and family) and social norms. Besides, Catalonian adolescents showed a lower perception of their academic qualification than Galician students, which could be due to a worse school self-esteem for the former than the latter [31,37]. This could explain why no differences appeared in cannabis consumption in the multivariate analyses.…”

“…FRESC was designed by the Public Health Agency of Barcelona in order to explore the emerging risk behaviours in adolescents [30]. FRESC has demonstrated good metric qualities in several studies carried out in the Spanish adolescent population [31,32]; hence, the instrument is reliable to be used in our study. The same questionnaire was used to measure the target variables in the entire sample.…”

“…Family Affluence Scale (FAS): Family Affluence Scale is a widely used scale to measure the socioeconomic status in the adolescent population [34]. FAS has been validated in European populations [35] and widely used in populations similar to ours [9,10,23,31].…”