Comparative Association of Substance Use, Psychosocial Factors, and Suicidal Ideation in Turkish Youth

The existing literature on the contribution of substance use and psychosocial risk factors in the development of suicidal ideation in the Turkish youth provides limited information. This study aims to compare the relative association of substance use and psychosocial risk factors with suicidal ideations in a sample of high school students in Istanbul. High school students were administered a survey of 66 questions in the school setting. The total number of students surveyed was 31,604 by the Istanbul Department of Education, and the primary questions and their sub-questions generated dependent and independent variables that were used in this study. The relationship between substance use, psychosocial factors, and suicidal ideation was explored in this study. Logistic regression was used with independent variables, such as substance use, light users, and heavy users and dependent variables as suicidal ideation. The variation explained by this model was compared to the variation explained by the psychosocial factors (age, gender, school type, immigration status, perceived family affluence, parental education, school grades, self-esteem scale, faith scale, anomie scale, anxiety scale, depression scale, irritability scale, antisocial personality scale, time with peers, time with family, parental involvement, family substance use, and peer influence) while exploring the strength of the associations for each factor. Psychosocial factors explained 33.8 % variance in the dependent variable, i.e., suicidal ideation, whereas substance use among those participants explained only 2.2 % variance in predicting suicidal ideation. Restricting analyses to heavy drug users found a consistently low explained variance of about 1.5 % of suicidal ideation in this population. The psychosocial factors are stronger predictors of suicidal ideation as compared to the substance use risk factors in a sample of Turkish youth.