Half of U.S. adults have psychiatric disorder

Cambridge, Massachusetts, February 4: Almost half of all the U.S. adults, who may or may not be college students, suffer from at least one psychiatric disorder.

A government funded survey studied 5000, 19 to 25 years old, adults across the United States. It could spot at least one psychiatric disorder in each of almost 50 percent of the subjects studied.

While most of the disorders in college students are alcohol induced, among non-college adults, drugs pose the greater havoc. National Epidemiologic Study on Alcohol and Related Conditions, done at Columbia University, reached the aforesaid conclusion.

Distress overrides the adults mostly when confronted with questions like, “Who will I be? Will I make friends? The romantic relationships, planning for the future . . . there is all kinds of stuff going on at the same time, including raging hormonesdefine,” says Ronald Kessler, a medical sociologist at Harvard Medical School.

Stress exists in adults irrespective of their education status. However, college students are found relatively less anguished and have lower level of depressiondefine and anxiety than non-college ones.

Dr. Paul Barreira, a psychiatrist and director of Behavioral Health and Academic Counseling at Harvard University Health Services., says suicide rate is three times lesser among college students than non-collegiate adults.

Among several emotional traumas, failure in love affects the maximum number of the adults. And here, college students are affected the most. They are two times more likely to suffer emotional crisis than non-college adults.

College angst can be figured by these statistics, but, “We don't know to what extent kids are having more difficulties and to what extent we are much better at recognizing and diagnosing them,” says Dr. Andrew Leuchter, a psychiatrist and associate dean of the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles.