Professor Barbara Dooley:

Certainly the link between alcohol, drug use and mental health is pretty clear but which comes first is the more difficult matter to disaggregate. It is important that we are mindful that these two issues may go together. If we are working with young people or our students who are struggling, we must try to understand to what extent they are engaging in risky behaviours. Mental illnesses, for example anxiety or depression, present themselves as how the student is feeling but we must ask what triggers have led to that feeling. Those are the types of things we need to understand. Triggers may be alcohol, drug use or other environmental issues such as if students are struggling with relationships. The complexity of mental health is what makes this work difficult and is the reason there is no perfect solution. It is because of the complexity of the lives of young people and of how they are living. It is incumbent on us when they present to try to unpick some of those things and perhaps put the right supports in place at that time. Certainly from our work there is evidence to link those two things and they are pretty strongly linked. People who have dangerous levels of alcohol-related behaviour or whatever are more likely to report depression, anxiety and suicide attempts.