Drunk drivers often have mental disorders: study By Melissa Schorr NEW YORK, Oct 15 (Reuters Health) - Men and women arrested for drunk driving commonly suffer from psychiatric disorders and may benefit from interventions aimed at their mental health problems, researchers report.
"If people have alcohol problems but have other psychiatric issues as well, you can't just treat them for their alcoholism and expect things are going to get better," Dr. Sandra C. Lapham, director of the Behavioral Health Research Center of the Southwest in Albuquerque, New Mexico, told Reuters Health.
Lapham and colleagues studied more than 1,100 men and women who had been convicted of driving while impaired (DWI) in New Mexico 5 years earlier. The drivers were interviewed about their history of drug and alcohol addictions, as well as other psychiatric disorders.
The researchers then compared those rates with estimated rates in the general population. Their findings are published in the October issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry.
The investigators found that 91% of the men and 85% of the women convicted of drunk driving reported having had an alcoholic-use disorder at some point in their lives, compared with 44% and 22%, respectively, in the general population. Among these individuals, half of the women and one third of the men had at least one other psychiatric problem--mainly major depression or post-traumatic stress disorder.
"If you have a conviction for DWI, that's a good indication this person has a history of alcoholic dependence," Lapham noted. "They would tell us, 'it only happened once, it never happened before,' but I think you need to take that with a grain of salt."
Similarly, 38% of men and 32% of women convicted of drunk driving also had suffered a drug-use disorder at some point in their lives, compared with 21% and 16% of men and women in the general population.
The fact that many of the study participants had mental conditions other than drug and alcohol dependence suggests that addressing drunk drivers' addictions alone will not solve the problem, according to Lapham.
"You can't assign someone with depression to eight sessions on alcohol ( dependence) and expect that will have a lot of impact," she said. "Treatment programs which have been evaluated in the past are not very effective in helping people."
Lapham added, "If people running those programs start evaluating (DWI offenders) for psychiatric problems, they might do better at treating this population."
SOURCE: Archives of General Psychiatry 2001;58:943-949.
Copyright © 2001 Reuters Limited.