Anxiety, Substance Use, and Their Co-Occurrence: Advances in Clinical Science

Research and clinical literatures are replete with examples that psychological disorders are related to drug use, abuse, and dependence. The preponderance of scientific work addressing relations among psychopathological processes and drug use, abuse, and dependence has been focused primarily on psychotic disorders, major depression, antisocial personality disorder, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. This corpus of empirical work has indicated that there are clinically meaningful relations among particular types of psychopathology and the onset and maintenance of substance use behaviors and disorders and, in turn, that substance use and use-related problems can impact vulnerability for psychopathology. Within this public health context, it is striking that despite the fact that anxiety disorders are one of the most common classes of psychological problems (Kessler et al., 2005), there has been limited programmatic study of the relations between anxiety vulnerability processes and substance use disorders.