General Health Status and Marital Satisfaction among Female Drug Abusers

Dear Editor:

Studies show that drug abusers’ spouses are more likely to develop mental disorders, psychosis and behavioral disturbance than normal couples; they may experience more anxiety, insomnia and depression. Additionally, they are sensitive to their interpersonal relationships and face multiple problems in their social function [1]. Moreover, drug abuse results in the increased marital conflicts and sexual disorders for the one’s spouse; a phenomenon that, in return, is associated with a variety of psychological problems of these spouses and increases their family life breakdown [2]. Therefore, paying attention to the role of women and their health and satisfaction in all families, especially such families, is of great importance. The aim of present study is to examine the general health and marital satisfaction among women who abuse drugs. Members of the selected group would contain 41 women whose husbands had drug abuse and were selected as available among the members of Anonymous Narcotics groups specific to the addicts’ spouses. The control group would consist of 35 subjects who were the partner of healthy individuals. They also were selected by the same sampling method from city of Mashhad. Study tools would include the ENRICH’s marital satisfaction questionnaire and Kelberg’s general health assessment scale 28. In the research by Ahmadian, the reliability of Kelberg’s general health scale obtained by Cronbach's alpha coefficient for the subscales of physical symptoms, anxiety, social disorder, depression, and general mental health scale were 0.77, 0.77, 0.48, 0.85 and 0.90, respectively. The validity of general health questionnaire obtained by correlation with other instruments such as the psycho-social Environment and SCL-90 questionnaires has been about 0.78 [3]. Various studies have reported the reliability of the long and short forms of marital satisfaction questionnaire using the alpha coefficient method as 0.95. To determine the research’s validity, ENRICH Scale has been compared with family environment scale and Dyadic adjustment scale and confirmed the validity of this scale. Data was analyzed using the covariance analysis statistical test along with multiple variables. There was a significant difference between the two groups in the marital satisfaction subscales including relationships, activities of leisure, ideological orientation, personality issues, financial supervision, and total score. Also, there was a significant difference between the two groups in the public health subscales including social function, symptoms of depression, and total score, so that the score of women with healthy husbands compared to those with addicted husbands was more on all of the foregoing subscales and total score (p=0.05). Findings indicated that the more educated the addicts’ wives are, the more the physical symptoms, depression, anxiety and sleep disturbances decrease among them. This decrease is probably due to the effective role of education in the management and true expression of emotions and using less of the physical mechanisms. The results showed that as the husbands’ education level increases, there are less problems in respect of financial issues and the equality of women and men roles. In fact, the more educated the husband is, the better he can run the financial issues of life and the fairer his values and attitudes are towards the marital roles. Finally, because the unhealthy family environments follow decreasing satisfaction and increasing the household sufferings, paying attention to the women's health and their role in family can really contribute to a decrease in the sufferings of other family members.