Alexithymia, social support, psycho-social stress and mental health in a female population.
BACKGROUND
We wanted to look into what impact the level of alexithymia, as assessed by the Toronto Alexithymia Scale with 20 items (TAS-20), has on presence of social support and vulnerability for psycho-social stress assessed as occurrence of serious life-events, in an all-female population.


METHODS
A total of 1032 of females employed in a child-care programme in Sweden participated. They were asked to fill in a questionnaire and 864 (83.6%) delivered complete tests.


RESULTS
The prevalence of alexithymia was 7.9% and there were significant associations between high TAS-20 scores with low level of education. In addition, this assessment showed significant relationships between global TAS-20, as well as the sub-factors of TAS-20 and lower social support. Having a low level of social support was found to be 3.5 times more common in the part of the population who was alexithymic. It was also 2.6 times more common for the alexithymic part of the population not to have someone to turn to. Alexithymics with low support and no life events had overall mean scores on all the three variables presenting them as worse off from a mental health point of view. When life events were present alexithymics remained worse off than non-alexithymics even when a higher level of support was in place. There was a significant direct protective (salutary) effect of social support found for social disability in the alexithymic population.


CONCLUSIONS
Alexithymics in this study showed a lack of social support and a proneness to high levels of negative emotion and to social distress.
Posse
M
M
Neurotec Department, Karolinska Institutet, Huddinge University Hospital, M-57, S-14186 Stockholm, Sweden.
Hällström
T
T
Backenroth-Ohsako
G
G
D000328:Adult; D000342:Affective Symptoms / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000453:epidemiology*; D011569:Psychiatric Status Rating Scales; D012307:Risk Factors; D012944:Social Support; D013315:Stress, Psychological; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D013548:Sweden / Q000453:epidemiology