Effects of Drug Users’ Childhood Trauma on Drug Addiction: Focusing on the Mediating Effects of Depression
TL;DR
Results show that when the negative life experience of childhood trauma is not resolved and fixed, it acts as an empirical mechanism to deepen drug addiction through depression beyond simple emotional reactions and suggests that there is an urgent need for a practical intervention to weaken the mediating path of depression in the relationship between childhood trauma and drug addiction.
Abstract
The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of childhood trauma of drug users on drug addiction and to verify the mediating effect of depression in their relationships. Through this, we tried to derive practical and policy intervention measures to effectively prevent and cope with drug recurrence of drug users. In order to achieve the purpose of this study, a survey was conducted on 184 drug users who were ordered to take classes at a probation office in Seoul. The collected data were measured using the childhood trauma (CTQ-SF), drug addiction (DAST-10), and depression (CES-D) scale. For data analysis, demographic characteristics were confirmed using the IBM SPSS 24.0 program, and Pearson correlation analysis between major variables was conducted. After that, SPSS PROCESS Macro 4.2 (Model 4) was applied to verify the mediating effect of the mediating variable (depression) in the path of the independent variable (childhood trauma) on the dependent variable (drug addiction). The conclusions and academic implications derived based on the analysis results of this study are as follows. First, childhood trauma was found to have a positive (+) effect that significantly increased the level of depression and drug addiction. Second, it was confirmed that depression had a statistically significant positive (+) effect on drug addiction. Third, it was verified that the partial mediating effect of depression was significant in the relationship between childhood trauma and drug addiction. These results show that when the negative life experience of childhood trauma is not resolved and fixed, it acts as an empirical mechanism to deepen drug addiction through depression beyond simple emotional reactions. In other words, it suggests that there is an urgent need for a practical intervention that can weaken the mediating path of depression in the relationship between childhood trauma and drug addiction. In conclusion, this study has implications in that it provided basic data for clinical, practical, systematic, and policy interventions to reduce depression in drug users with childhood trauma and ultimately prevent recurrence of drug addiction.