Dual diagnosis among psychiatric inpatients in the institute of psychiatry Ain Shams University

Abstract

ual diagnosis is the term to describe people who have severe mental heath problems and drug or alcohol problems. The mental health problems may include schizophrenia, depression or bi-polar disorder, manic depression or personality disorder. The following psychiatric problems are common in dual diagnosis: Depressive disorder, such as depression, bipolar disorder and Anxiety disorders, including generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder and phobias. Other psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia and personality disorders. Having a mental health diagnosis significantly increases the risk of misusing alcohol and drugs. Substance use disorder (SUD) is one of the most complicated problems that face the whole community not only medical professionals resulting from the enormous social , personal and economic costs of such disorder, SUD forms a cause of preventable illness and death in our country and other countries both developed and developing ones A national survey report stated that 8.5% of Egyptians, which is about 6 million people – are addicted to drugs the comorbidity of psychiatric disorders with substance dependence, and the apparent neurobiological link between these disorders has important implications for both the treatment of these diseases and for public health policy. It is important for the community, health care practitioners and policy-makers to recognize that this neurobiological link clearly indicates that psychiatric disorders and substance dependence are diseases stemming from underlying neuropathologies. So we conducted this cross sectional descriptive study among the newly admitted patients in the institute of psychiatry, Ain Shams University,to measure the co-occurence of comorbid substance use and psychiatric disorders, among inpatients of the institute of psychiatry Ain Shams University in a period of 3 months,to detect the clinical profile of dual diagnosis among a sample of Egyptian patients and to determine correlations between the severity of psychiatric illness and the severity substance misuse among psychiatric institute inpatients. The hypothesis of the study was: Patients with dual diagnosis will have more severe psychiatric disorders. All subjects were assessed according to psychiatric interview and then The Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV- TR Axis I Disorders (SCID-I) was done for all patients. According to its results patients who were diagnosed with both substance abuse and another psychiatric disorder, were further assessed by the addiction severity index. Also other specific