Attitudes are associated with the drug use profiles of middle school adolescents: A latent class analysis

Profiles of mental illness in college students and associated factors: A latent class analysis

Mental illness among university students poses a pressing challenge for educational institutions, urging the need for strategies that foster health and mitigate mental distress, with an emphasis on preventing suicide. Our study sought to discern the profiles of mental illness among college students and explore the factors associated with them. We examined data from 918 students at a Brazilian Federal Institute, utilizing Latent Class Analysis and multinomial regression for our analyses. We identified three distinct mental illness profiles: Anxiety with Low Suicide Risk; Mental Illness with Moderate Suicide Risk; and Mental Illness with High Suicide Risk. We observed a reduced association of these profiles with religious beliefs. Conversely, there was a heightened association with cisgender women, individuals identifying as LGBTQI+, those with learning disabilities, and victims of sexual violence. Our findings underscore the importance of tailored prevention and health promotion programs to enhance student well-being. There's a compelling need to devise mental health strategies tailored to the specific needs of the identified groups, particularly students from the LGBTQI + community, survivors of sexual abuse, and those grappling with learning disabilities.

Changes in alcohol beliefs mediate the effects of a school-based prevention program on alcohol use among Brazilian adolescents

OBJECTIVE

To investigate the mechanisms of the #Tamojunto2.0 program that mediated the prevention of lifetime alcohol and drug use, including drug knowledge, behavioral beliefs, attitudes, decision-making skills, and refusal skills.

METHODS

A cluster-randomized controlled trial was conducted in 73 public middle schools in three Brazilian cities. The sample included 5208 students (49.4 % girls; M_age = 13.2 years). The intervention group attended twelve #Tamojunto2.0 lessons conducted by their previously trained teachers. The control group did not receive any intervention. Data were collected pre-intervention and at the 9-months follow-up. We performed multiple mediation models (for the whole sample, users, and non-users) with a post-estimation adjustment to standard errors to account for nesting. We analyzed all available mediators simultaneously according to each drug: alcohol, binge drinking, tobacco, marijuana, and inhalant lifetime use. To handle missing data, we used the "full-information maximum-likelihood" paradigm.

RESULTS

Outcomes in the whole sample and among non-users showed that #Tamojunto2.0 indirectly prevented lifetime alcohol use and binge drinking by increasing negative and non-positive alcohol beliefs. Only the direct effect on decreasing lifetime alcohol consumption was statistically significant. However, an indirect increase in binge drinking was observed through knowledge about alcohol, but the direct effect was not statistically significant. No effects were reported for marijuana, tobacco, or inhalants. Among users, no statistically significant effects were found for alcohol or drug use.

CONCLUSIONS

The results suggest that the #Tamojunto2.0 program was only effective in delaying alcohol consumption via increasing negative and non-positive alcohol beliefs. It seems that mediating mechanisms vary depending on contextual characteristics, differences in socializing among adolescents, features of the educational systems, psychosocial conditions, or, fidelity issues of program implementation.

Psychosocial Indicators of Adolescent Alcohol, Cigarette, and Marijuana Use: An Analysis of Normalized, Harmonized, and Pooled Data

We normalized, harmonized, and pooled 344,429 surveys collected from 106,470 research participants from 25 research studies that assessed past 30-day alcohol use, drunkenness, smoking cigarettes, using marijuana, and a host of psychosocial variables. After normalizing and harmonizing psychosocial measures, we completed analyses to examine the ability of psychosocial variables to serve as proxy indicators of use. Intentionality, peer descriptive normative beliefs, and age emerged as being of primary importance in indicating use. Additional variables - peer injunctive norms, beliefs about the positive and negative consequences of use, and attitudes - were also demonstrated to have the potential to serve as proxies in the assessment of substance use risk. There were developmental patterns in how intentionality and descriptive normative beliefs changed with age. Young adolescents had scores that are protective; they have positive intentionality and do not see the prevalence of alcohol and other drug use as widespread. These and other psychosocial variable's mean scores generally erode with age while the distribution of scores widens as youth grow older. The goal of analyses was to define age-related psychosocial profiles that can be used prospectively to estimate substance use risk. These profiles are useful in creating virtual control cases for evaluating disseminated prevention programs.