No abstract

A significant minority of MSM are using prescription medications without a doctor's consent. Men who do so are risking negative consequences of such use, including the potential for addiction, potentially dangerous interactions between prescription and recreational drugs, and greater risk for contracting HIV.

In recent years, the non-medical use of prescription drugs (without a doctor's prescription) has increased dramatically. Less attention has been paid to the intentional misuse of over-the-counter (OTC) medications. Misuse of OTC medications has negative health consequences similar to those of illicit drugs, including psychosis, tachycardia, seizures and agitation. When mixed with alcohol or other drugs, these medications can also be dangerous: OTC-related emergency room visits increased 70% from 2004 to 2008. This study examined the intentional misuse of OTC medications, the non-medical use of prescription drugs, the use of alcohol and illicit drugs, and psychological factors in two samples of young adults (ages 18-25) from different areas of the United States (Total N = 1,197). Overall, 18.6% of the Colorado sample and 13.0% of the Virginia sample reported lifetime misuse of an OTC medication. Participants who reported misusing OTC medications were also significantly more likely to report using marijuana, ecstasy, cocaine, and non-medical use of prescription analgesics, stimulants, anxiolytics, and sedatives. Participants who reported misusing OTC medications were more than twice as likely to report hazardous alcohol use, relative to individuals who denied misusing OTC medications. Individuals who had misused OTC medications scored significantly higher in sensation seeking and hopelessness and reported more symptoms of depression, anxiety, and somatic distress, relative to those who denied OTC misuse. Results suggest that a considerable minority of young adults are jeopardizing their health with the misuse of OTC medications as part of a pattern of polysubstance use.

Infants of mothers who varied in symptoms of depression were tested at 4 and 12 months of age for their ability to associate a segment of an unfamiliar non-depressed mother’s infant-directed speech (IDS) with a face. At 4 months, all infants learned the voice-face association. At 12 months, despite the fact that none of the mothers were still clinically depressed, infants of mothers with chronically elevated self-reported depressive symptoms, and infants of mothers with elevated self-reported depressive symptoms at 4 months but not 12 months, on average did not learn the association. For infants of mothers diagnosed with depression in remission, learning at 12 months was negatively correlated with the postpartum duration of the mother’s depressive episode. At neither age did extent of pitch modulation in the IDS segments correlate with infant learning. However, learning scores at 12 months correlated significantly with concurrent maternal reports of infant receptive language development. The roles of the duration and timing of maternal depressive symptoms are discussed.

The hypothesis that the associative learning-promoting effects of infant-directed speech (IDS) depend on infants’ social experience was tested in a conditioned-attention paradigm with a cumulative sample of 4- to 14-month-old infants. Following six forward pairings of a brief IDS segment and a photographic slide of a smiling female face, infants of clinically depressed mothers exhibited evidence of having acquired significantly weaker voice–face associations than infants of non-depressed mothers. Regression analyses revealed that maternal depression was significantly related to infant learning even after demographic correlates of depression, antidepressant medication use, and extent of pitch modulation in maternal IDS had been taken into account. However, after maternal depression had been accounted for, maternal emotional availability, coded by blind raters from separate play interactions, accounted for significant further increments in the proportion of variance accounted for in infant learning scores. Both maternal depression and maternal insensitivity negatively, and additively, predicted poor learning.