Wealthy Youth Prone To Substance Abuse

Middle-school students who come from wealthy families may have more to worry about than you might think.

Affluent, suburban middle-school students may face certain pressures that make them susceptible to depression, according to Columbia University researchers. These pressures also make the students more likely to smoke or use drugs and alcohol, the study found.

Researchers studied 302 students in sixth and seventh grades who live in an affluent community in the Northeast where median annual family income in the year 2000 was almost $102,000. The 1999 national median income was $40,816, according to the U.S. Census.

Researchers found an "unusually high" incidence of depressive symptoms among the girls compared with national averages, high occurrence of substance use among both boys and girls, and a tendency of peers to "actively approve" of substance use among boys.

Achievement pressures from parents or from the students themselves are likely to blame for the trend, the researchers said. In affluent suburban communities, securing admission to stellar colleges is often a priority, which makes many students feel driven to excel at academics and extracurricular activities, according to the study.

"Also of apparent significance is isolation from adults, particularly levels of perceived closeness with mothers, and for girls, the presence of adult supervision in the hours immediately after school," the researchers wrote.

Use of drugs or alcohol tripled between sixth and seventh grades, according to the study. In the sixth-grade sample, 15 percent of boys and 11 percent of girls drank alcohol at least once in the preceding year, compared with 35 percent of both girls and boys in seventh grade.

Seven percent of sixth-grade boys and 8 percent of sixth-grade girls smoked cigarettes, compared with 20 percent of boys and 24 percent of girls in seventh grade. Marijuana use was not present among the sixth-graders, but by seventh grade, 6 percent of girls and 7 percent of boys had used that drug at least once in the previous year.

Seventh-grade boys in this study who smoked or used drugs and alcohol were among the most popular in their peer group, although researchers said some of them seemed to elicit particularly negative reactions from peers.

The researchers found that seventh-grade girls in the affluent suburban sample were about twice as likely as other girls to show clinically significant depression.

The study also found that students who had the closest relationships with their mothers were the least likely to smoke or use drugs and alcohol or to show symptoms of distress. Relationships with fathers did not figure as prominently, except in girls' academic grades.

The researchers found that boys were more likely than girls to be unsupervised after school, but girls who were unsupervised were more likely to exhibit behavioral problems.