Assessment of psychiatric drugs use and related factors among students of Zahedan University of Medical Sciences (ZUMS) in 2007

The previous studies in Iran and around the world showed that the use of psychiatric drugs is highand usually is not physician permitted. The students are exposed with various stressor factors, so they are at high risk. The purpose of this study is assessment of related factors of using these drugs among students of ZahedanUniversity of Medical Sciences.
Methods and Materials: This cross-sectional study carried out on 300 students of ZUMS in 2007.The subjects were selected using stratified random sampling. The data collected with interview and registered in questionnaire. In addition to demographic information, we asked from all subjects about history of use of these drugs, type of drugs, and history of illness. The data were analyzed by SPSS version 13 soft ware using descriptive and analytical (chi square test) statistics. Significant level was set as 0.05.
Results: 208 (69.3%) of subjects was females and 92 (30.7%) was males. Thirty one percent were in medical and the others were in health, nursing and paramedical faculty. Only 10% of students were married. The prevalence of use of these drugs was 20.3% that were 18.9% and 24.7% among female and male students respectively (P>0.05). Use of drugs was related to grade point average in previous semester, field of students, history of referring to psychiatry and smoking (P<0.05) and was not related to interesting to current field, age, living place, sex, marital status, size of household and graduate level (P>0.05).
Conclusion: As compared with previous studies in Iran and around the world, the use of these drugs among students of Zahedan University of Medical Sciences is high, so planning toward decreasing of these drugs consumption (especially when is not physician permitted) and discover it's cause is too important. It seems that more council with student that uninterested to their course, medical students and students with history of referring to psychiatrist and also prevention of smoking can be decreased use of these drugs.