James A. Halikas

A systematic study of psychiatric illness in freshman college students.

Abstract The majority of estimates of the rate of college student psychiatric illness has been based on data obtained from treated samples of students. 1,2 The biases inherent in treated samples have been extensively documented. Few studies have dealt with the occurrence of psychiatric illness in a randomly selected sample of students, a study design that avoids the problems of using a treated population. This study describes the psychiatric problems, during the freshman year, of such a randomly selected, prospectively studied sample of 158 college students. The questions to be answered by this report are: (1) What proportion of a college population have a psychiatric problem during the course of the freshman year? (2) What proportion will seek treatment? (3) What proportion of the ill group will seek treatment? (4) What is the predominant psychiatric disturbance seen?

The black addict: I.Methodology, chronology of addiction, and overview of the population.

One hundred ninety-two Black, male heroin addicts in various phases of treatment and nontreatment, including never-treated active addicts and actively addicted treatment dropouts, were systematically interviewed for early life events, psychosocial variables, and natural history of addiction. This report presents the chronology of the addiction problem from childhood as well as evidence of significant early antisocial activities predating drug use in this population. Data on family characteristics, arrests, problems in formal schooling, and adult activities are summarized. The current work is compared to earlier data on comparable populations.

A systematic study of the prevalence of drug use in freshman college students

Abstract Prior studies of drug use among college student have utilized samples of students attending student health facilities, or a proportion of students responding to mailed or personal questionnaires. 1,2 Both types of samples represent limited and possibly biased sources of information. To overcome this possible bias, the present work reports student drug use in a randomly selected sample of a total student freshman population, with information obtained from 97% of the selected sample of 158 students. The study seeks to ascertain what proportion of students use drugs, how often, which drugs, what changes in student drug use occur during the freshman year, and in what ways users differ from nonusers.