Abigail Matson
I am a Community Health major on a pre-OT track. My research interests include substance use and mental health. Some of my research experience includes working on this literature review and on a meta-analysis about maternal smoking and offspring’s use of tobacco. My professional ambitions would be working as an occupational therapist in Indiana.
Adolescent Anxiety and Substance Use in Rural vs. Urban Settings: A Scoping Review
Background: 31.9% of adolescents suffer from anxiety (NIMH, n.d.) whereas 46.6% of adolescents have reported using substances such as marijuana, alcohol, and other drugs (NCDAS, 2022). Moreover, anxiety and substance use are commonly seen to co-occur. However, there is a lack of unifying literature that investigate the difference between rural and urban contexts within adolescents.
Objective: The purpose of the current scoping review was to determine what is known about the association between adolescent substance use and anxiety disorders in rural vs. urban contexts.
Methods: We conducted a review of the literature to find articles on adolescent anxiety and substance use in rural vs. urban contexts. Some key words searched in Google Scholar and PubMed include adolescent, substance use, anxiety, and rural-urban.
Results: We found seven articles that fit the final criteria. Broadly, the research found on adolescent anxiety was mixed and limited, finding elevated rates of anxiety in adolescents in both urban and rural contexts (Hesketh & Ding, 2005; Romans et al., 2011). Findings on substance use were substance specific; in rural settings adolescents were found to report using more alcohol, tobacco, and prescription opioids, and in urban settings adolescents reported using more marijuana and illicit substances (Warren et al., 2016; Monnat & Rigg, 2016). Our search returned no studies examining the association between adolescent anxiety and substance use in rural versus urban contexts.
Conclusion: The robust association between anxiety and substance use in adolescence is compounded by evidence that these individual problems vary in rural vs. urban contexts. Future research should specifically examine their association in rural vs. urban contexts, which we theorize to be nuanced and substance specific.
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