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Children's Mental Health, Substance Abuse Association |
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From Rutgers University: Research underway at Rutgers University---Camden seeks to examine links between children's mental health problems and alcohol, nicotine, and illegal drug use over time. The National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded a highly prestigious Career Development Award to Naomi Marmorstein, an associate professor of psychology at Rutgers-Camden, who will use the $649,503 grant to further her intensive research on how children's anxiety and depression may be associated with substance abuse throughout adulthood. According to the NIH, Marmorstein's award is part of an integrated program designed to foster the development of outstanding scientists and enable them to expand their potential to make important scientific contributions. If we can get youth on a trajectory of healthy emotional and behavioral development, they are at reduced risk for psychiatric and substance abuse problems as adults," says Marmorstein. During the next five years, Marmorstein will receive specialized training on complex statistical techniques; collect her own data with child-appropriate questionnaires; and revaluate existing data with new research methodologies that allow for more fine-grained analyses of developmental trajectories over time. She also will seek to pinpoint crucial differences between types of internalizing disorders, like generalized anxiety and social anxiety, to examine whether these problems relate to substance abuse in different ways. "We have known for a long time that some people who have depression or anxiety drink alcohol or use drugs to cope with those unpleasant feelings; this is called the 'self-medication' model of substance abuse. It is time to apply the advances we have made in research methodologies in order to better understand these associations," says Marmorstein.
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