Depressive symptoms differentiating between heroin addicts and alcoholics.

The Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) was self-administered to 105 outpatient alcoholics and 211 methadone maintenance patients seeking treatment at a large community mental health center to determine whether or not specific depressive symptoms differentiated the groups. Canonical correlations were first calculated between the set of 21 BDI items and the patients' demographic characteristics of sex, race and age to ascertain if these characteristics should be controlled before making comparisons between the two types of substance abusers. Age and sex were significantly related to self-reported depressive symptomatology and were entered first into a stepwise discriminant analysis with the 21 BDI items followed by type of substance abuse. Four symptoms contributed at least 5% to the overall discrimination between the alcoholics and the heroin addicts; these were sense of failure, weight loss, somatic preoccupation, and loss of libido. The alcoholics described themselves as feeling more like failures and having more somatic preoccupation than the heroin addicts, whereas the heroin addicts reported more weight loss and loss of libido. To estimate the efficiency with which these four symptoms could differentiate between the alcoholics and heroin addicts, discriminant classification analysis was employed; 69.3% of the substance abusers were correctly assigned to their type of addiction. The results were discussed as supporting the contention that alcoholics and heroin addicts may display different depressive symptoms.