Women with antisocial behaviour: long-term health disability and help-seeking for emotional problems.
BACKGROUND
Previous studies have reported that women who display antisocial behaviour (ASB) as adults or adolescents are at increased risk of poor mental and physical health, but have not tested effects of sociodemographics, or used only incarcerated samples.


OBJECTIVE
The authors sought first to test associations between ASB and emotional or physical health problems in non-incarcerated women, and second whether any such association could be explained by sociodemographic factors.


METHODS
The sample was 1218 mothers, aged 22-59, of boys randomly selected from grades 1, 4 and 7 (aged about 7, 10 and 13 respectively) in US urban public schools in 1987 and 1988. The 30% of boys designated most antisocial on initial examination and a 30% random sample of the remainder entered the longitudinal study. Demographics for the mothers, data on their lifetime ASB, help-seeking for emotional and/or physical health problems were collected at interview with them. A history of adolescent conduct problems and/or lifetime police contacts led to classification as antisocial for this study.


RESULTS
A total of 214 (17.6 %) of the mothers met our criteria for ASB. Compared with the women without such history, the women with ASB were younger, less well educated, of lower socioeconomic status, had a higher rate of unemployment and more of them were single mothers. They more often sought help for emotional problems and reported higher rates of long-term physical health problems, even when the effects of sociodemographic factors were taken into account.


CONCLUSIONS
Although the findings rule out many sociodemographic factors as simple explanations for the association between ASB and poor emotional and physical health, more work is needed on the nature and extent of such disorder, and of temporal relationships between the key events: poor health and ASB.
Columbus Children's Research Institute, Department of Pediatrics, College of Medicine and Public Health, The Ohio State University, USA. pajerk@pediatrics.ohio-state.edu
Kathleen
K
Pajer
Magda
M
Stouthamer-Loeber
William
W
Gardner
Rolf
R
Loeber
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000342:Affective Symptoms / Q000453:epidemiology*; D000987:Antisocial Personality Disorder / Q000453:epidemiology*; D002648:Child; D002908:Chronic Disease; D015897:Comorbidity; D004185:Disability Evaluation; D005260:Female; D006304:Health Status; D006801:Humans; D007604:Juvenile Delinquency / Q000523:psychology / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D008137:Longitudinal Studies; D008297:Male; D009035:Mothers / Q000523:psychology / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D020380:Needs Assessment / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D010342:Patient Acceptance of Health Care / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D010414:Pennsylvania; D012016:Reference Values; D012306:Risk; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors