Swiss heroin-addicted females. Career and social adjustment.

Studies on gender-related differences among heroin-addicted individuals are uncommon because women usually make up only one quarter of any one sample group. In our sample group of 248 Swiss-German heroin-addicted individuals from different therapeutic programs and prisons, 70 were women (28.2%). Follow-up investigations were conducted after a lapse of 2 years, and after a lapse of 7 years, respectively. Men and women appear to differ with respect to why they begin to use drugs, as well as why they relapse back into drug use. Prior to the commencement of drug abuse, social background concerns and social adjustment dynamics appear to constitute a heavier burden for women than for men. Observations of social functioning and adjustment phenomena made during their drug careers and in the follow-up investigations, however, failed to yield significant statistical differences. The predominant effects of drug use appear to eclipse the gender-related role-pattern. On the basis of our background data, as well as our therapeutic experience, we postulate that for an individual whose sex-role identity is threatened, drug abuse has a stabilizing function, and it carries a message.

[A communications theory approach to the mechanisms of development of psychiatric disorders exemplified by foreign workers]. / Ein kommunikationstheoretischer Ansatz der Entstehungsmechanismen psychischer Störungen am Beispiel von ausländischen Arbeitnehmern.

This article is intended as a contribution towards interpreting the development of psychiatric symptoms as a final result of disturbed processes of communication. We should like to point out that the importance of communication for normal and abnormal behaviour has been established both from the viewpoints of sociopsychology and family therapy as well as of cognition psychology and psychophysiology. The present study is limited to the presentation of clinical aspects, but it should be pointed out that a systematic phase concept of treatment can be developed via an integration of psychophysiological research studies on this subject; however, we have not gone into this possibility in detail in the present study.