Substance abuse, knowledge of its long-term effects and occurrence of depressive symptoms among health students in a Nigerian tertiary institution

Introduction: Substance abuse confers enormous health, psychosocial and economic cost on the society, it has been found to be prevalent among young people in both developing and developed countries alike. Depression is one of the commonest byproducts of drugs abuse. In this study we evaluated the knowledge of the long term effects of drugs abuse and its prevalence among students of the college of health sciences of Nnamdi Azikiwe.

Methodology: The study is a descriptive cross-sectional survey done among final year undergraduate students of the College of Health Sciences, and the Faculty of Pharmaceutical sciences, Nnamdi Azikiwe University. A total of 200 students took part in the study. Data collection was with the use of semi structured, self-administered questionnaires, which were developed according to the specific objectives. Data analysis was done using SPSS version 22.

Result: The result showed a high prevalence of substance abuse among students of health sciences. Alcohol, with a rate of 31.5% is the most abused substance among the students surveyed, it is also the most abused substance among students in the school environment. The prevalence of depression for this study, which was done using the Beck's Depression Inventory (BDI), is 60.5%, with 12% having borderline clinical depression, 30% having moderate depression, 14% having severe depression and 4.5% having extreme depression.

Conclusion: Substance use and Depressive symptoms remains high among young people and is more in college students who represent the economic fulcrum and future of any society. It is recommended that further studies be done to evaluate for the depression distribution using other demographic indices as well as the causal relationship between substance use and depression.