The Role of Personality and Stress in the Development of Substance Use Disorder among Substance Use Disorder Patients in Kaduna State, Nigeria

This study investigated the role of personality and stress in the development of substance use disorder among substance use disorder patients in Kaduna State. A cross sectional design was adopted in the study and participants were 47 substance use disorder (SUD) patients (42 males and 5 females) between the ages of 18 – 40 years. They were drawn from the substance use disorder patients of Federal Neuropsychiatric Hospitals Kaduna using purposive sampling method in Kaduna. The questionnaire measures; Social and Psychological Determinants of Drug Abuse Questionnaire 1. ‘The Big Five Inventory’ (BFI) as developed by John and Srivastava 2, Drug Abuse Screening Test (DAST-28) developed by Skinner 3 and The Life Events Inventory’ 4 were completed by the participants. Prediction for the development of drugs use was considered using neuroticism, extraversion, and openness to experience, agreeability, conscientiousness and stress. While cross-sectional design was adopted for the study. Linear Regression Analysis and Hierarchical multiple regression analysis was applied to analyze the data. Results showed that neuroticism did not significantly predict substance use disorder (R= .040; F= .072, P > .05) thus, accounted for about 0.2% variance for the substance use disorder among clients. While extraversion significantly predict substance use disorder (R= .303; F= 4.557, P .05) thus, accounted for about 5.5% variance for the substance use disorder among clients. Agreeableness did not significantly predict substance use disorder (R= .241; F= 2.772, P > .05) thus, accounted for about 5.8% variance for the substance use disorder among clients. Also, the results indicates a no statistically significantly positive impact of agreeableness (β= .345 t= 1.665, p > .05) on substance use disorder. Conscientiousness did not significantly predict substance use disorder (R= .257; F= 3.024, P > .05) thus, accounted for about 6.3% variance for the substance use disorder among clients. Stress did not significantly predict substance use disorder (R= .020; F= .018, P > .05) thus, accounted for no variance for substance use disorder among clients. In hypothesis seven, it was shown that the first model was jointly significant F (5, 41) = 3.159, P< 0.05, R2 = 0.280. Both conscientiousness and extraversion were the significant predictors of substance use disorder. It is suggested that, clinicians treating the patients at the hospital should endeavor to assess personality factors and substance abuse disorders to ascertain their co-morbidity status and if found, should be treated for both at the same time to enhance better quality of life and reduce susceptibility to substance use disorder.