Understanding Psychiatric Comorbidities and Addictions

This chapter focuses on three subtypes of comorbidity in psychiatric comorbidity research concerning addictions. The chapter's examples generally concern neuropsychiatric and behavioral comorbidities, focusing on those related to use of tobacco, alcohol, inhalants, and the internationally regulated drugs (IRDs) such as cannabis and cocaine. The introduction to this chapter provides an initial orientation to the odds ratio (OR), the "workhorse" statistic for psychiatric comorbidity research. The second section of the chapter addresses empirical relevance of research on these three comorbidity subtypes. The third section covers standardized and validated methods in more detail, and is based on a general outline that considers alternative research designs and the population under study in comorbidity research. Issues pertinent to measurement are considered next. Finally, analysis methods in comorbidity research are addressed, prior to a general concluding section that recaps major limitations with a sketch of future directions. This edition first published 2013