Original articlePsychiatric symptoms and substance use disorders in a nationally representative sample of American adolescents involved with foster care
Section snippets
Data source
This study is based on data from the public use file of the 2000 National Household on Drug Abuse (NHSDA) [20]. This study was declared exempt from the Research Triangle Institute (RTI) International institutional review board because it used an existing public use data file. No information or identifiers on the data file can be associated with any survey respondent. The annual NHSDA is designed to provide national estimates of the use of a variety of licit and illicit substances by Americans
Results
In this section, we refer to adolescents with a lifetime history of foster care placement as “FC adolescents” and to those without such a history as the comparison group.
Discussion
Adolescents involved with foster care had more psychiatric symptoms of every type assessed than adolescents in the comparison group. This finding concurs with the extant literature [1], [3], [5], [6], [27], [28]. Compared with adolescents never placed in foster care, the past-year prevalence of conduct and anxiety symptoms was higher among adolescents involved with foster care. The preponderance of conduct symptoms among foster children has been reported by numerous investigators in the U.S.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported in part by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (R21AA013255) and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (R21DA015938). The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Data Archive and the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research provide the public use data files of the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, which is sponsored by Office of Applied Studies, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. At the time of the study, Dr.
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