Prevalence and Patterns of Substance Use Disorders Among Outpatients at Machakos County Referral Psychiatric Clinic in Machakos County.

Abstract

Introduction: There exists a high comorbidity of drug use disorders in mentally ill persons (Srivastava et al., 2018). There is scarcity of data locally on the prevalence, patterns of use, and the relationship of and SUDs and other psychiatric disorders. Aim: The study aimed to determine the prevalence and patterns of Substance Use Disorders and the relationship between Substance Use Disorders and other psychiatric disorders among outpatients at Machakos County Referral psychiatric clinic. Method: This was a cross-sectional descriptive study where data was collected from 127 outpatient psychiatric patients for quantitative study. Systematic stratified sampling method was used, where the researcher selected every 2nd patient in the clinic. The tools for data collection used were the socio-demographic questionnaire and the Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview (MINI) version 7.0.0. Data analysis: Data was entered into MS Excel and analysis done with SPSS version 23. For discrete variables, frequency tables were provided, while for continuous data, means and standard deviations were provided. Chi-square test was used to analyze the associations between variables at the bivariate level. Univariate analysis was done to show the prevalence, patterns and socio-demographic characteristics of the participants. Statistical significance thresholds was set at p < 0.05. Results: There were 127 participants for the study. The mean age was 36.4 (SD 13.6) years. Most of the participants were male (94, 74%). The study also found out that most participants were single 57.4%, unemployed 76%, and were Christians 96.9%. This study found out that prevalence of SUDs was 48.8 %. My study found that only four main substance use disorders were present. The most commonly used substance was alcohol at 40.2%, Nicotine (cigarettes, chavis and kuber) 40%, Khat 27.6% and cannabis 24.4%.There was a statistical significant association between gender and substance use disorder, where males were 16.9 times more likely to have substance use disorder compared to females. There was a statistically significant association between patients with psychotic disorders and substance disorder, where they were 6.7 times more likely to have substance disorder than those without xiii psychotic disorder. Patients with bipolar were more likely to have substance use disorder than those without the disorder, and this was statistically significant but with a weak association. Conclusion: This study found out that nearly half of the patients attending the psychiatric outpatient clinic in Machakos Level 5 Hospital had a substance use disorder indicating a high comorbidity of substance use disorders among psychiatric patients. There is a need to explore further why these patients continue to use substances despite having another mental illness.