Psychotrope and alcohol use by women: one or two populations?

From a telephone survey of 1,673 Montreal women, all consenting psychotrope users and randomly selected controls (N = 179) then were interviewed in their homes as to psychotropic drug and alcohol use. The results presented are based on these in-depth interviews. In the first phase of the analysis, the respondents were grouped according to whether they abstained from both alcohol and psychotropes, used alcohol alone, psychotropes alone, or both. The variables that distinguished these groups were determined by use of one-way analysis of variance. Some of these factors included age, level of education, anxiety, nervous tension, depression, subjective ratings of health, and responses to emotional upset. The second series of results involved correlation procedures to determine the covariates of alcohol and psychotrope use. Most significant of these findings were that psychotrope use was associated with anxiety, depression, and nervous tension, while alcohol use was not. Further, unlike alcohol use, psychotrope use was associated with a variety of coping techniques for dealing with emotional upset. The findings were interpreted to mean that there are two distinct populations.