Banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO: RENATA MACEDO DOS REIS JANUÁRIO DA SILVA

USE OF PSYCHOACTIVE SUBSTANCES BY UNIVERSITY STUDENTS AS A STRATEGY FOR COPING WITH STRESS

Psychoactive Substances, Stress, University students

During university life, students are faced with different stressful situations, which can act as risk factors for the abuse of psychoactive substances. Substance use disorders (SUD) are characterized by dysfunctional cognitive, behavioral and physiological patterns aimed at the search for and consumption of substances that cause functional impairments in the individual's life. The severity and problems associated with the pattern of consumption of these substances in the age group between 18 and 29 years old, relative to emerging adults, can be influenced by different factors associated with academic life, in the case of university students, and the modulation of usage behavior of substances. The indiscriminate use of drugs, even if legal, can have harmful consequences for the physical and mental health of young people and have repercussions on various segments of their social network, such as family and educational groups. This research, of a longitudinal quantitative-qualitative nature, aims to verify the use of legal and illicit psychoactive substances by university students as a way of coping with stress and, based on patterns of use, develop psychoeducational interventions to reduce the consumption of these substances.For this purpose, the research was structured in three stages: (1) investigate the pattern of use of psychoactive substances, legal and/or illicit, by at least 100 students enrolled in different courses at a public university (2) deepen the analysis of the context of use of psychoactive drugs as coping strategies in around 10 of the participants in the first stage, corresponding to those who present different patterns of use of psychoactive substances (3) propose and implement a psychoeducational intervention with the members of phase 2 based on the analyzes carried out based on data from previous stages and literature  using a Focus Group. To assess stress, instruments such as the Lipp Stress Symptom Inventory will be used, which will allow the assessment of the presence of stress, in addition to indicating which phase of stress the individual is in. Additionally, a general information questionnaire created by the authors will also be applied, with the aim of obtaining sociodemographic data. For the analysis in the context of the use of psychoactive substances, Coping Strategies were considered, as well as the Alcohol Smoking and Substance Involvement Screening Test (ASSIST), developed in partnership with the Organization of Health and also in the abbreviated version of the drug use confidence questionnaire (DTCQ-8). The data will be analyzed using descriptive statistical analysis using the SPSS version 20 program for Windows, making a comparison of the prevalence of stress and its phases with categorical sociodemographic data. In this way, we hope to better understand the relationship between stress and the use of psychoactive substances.