Personality Variables and Self-Medication in Substance Abuse

Khantzian (1985) has proposed a model of substance abuse that asserts that some drug-dependent individuals select a drug of choice to provide relief from specific painful affective states. This study was undertaken to examine the self-medication hypothesis in four groups of substance abusers defined by their use of specific drugs. The Personality Assessment Inventory (Morey, 1991), an inventory characterized by scales of homogeneous clinical content, was used to examine group differences in symptomatology and personality traits. Results suggest that there are traits or symptoms that separate various groups of drug-dependent patients, but not in concordance with the self-medication hypothesis.