Journal of Addiction Research & Therapy
Open Access

Research Article

Study on Prevalence and It's Contributing Factors of Psychoactive Substance Abuse among Homeless Children

¹Department of Psychiatry, DMCH College of Nursing, DMC and Hospital, Ludhiana, India

²Department of Med-Surg Nursing, DMCH College of Nursing, DMC and Hospital, Ludhiana, India

*Corresponding Author:

Manjinder Singh
Student, DMCH College of Nursing
DMC and Hospital, Ludhiana, India
Tel: +919888050856
E-mail: manjinderlehra@gmail.com

Received date: January 30, 2017; Accepted date: July 07, 2017; Published date: July 14, 2017

Citation: Singh M, Thapar K, Kaur J, Kumar P, Saini P (2017) Study on Prevalence and It’s Contributing Factors of Psychoactive Substance Abuse among Homeless Children. J Addict Res Ther 8:333. doi:10.4172/2155-6105.1000333

Copyright: © 2017 Singh M, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited

Homeless children are those who live alone on the street. UNICEF estimated that India has 18 million homeless children which is the largest population in the world. Use of psychoactive substance is particularly high in street children as seen in 40-70% of street children across various Indian cities are substance abusers. The study was conducted at District Ludhiana, Punjab. 60 Homeless children of age group 6-18 years were selected by snowball sampling. WHO Assist V 3.0 and a structured questionnaire were used to collect data. Findings reveals that 55 (91.7%) of the homeless children were psychoactive substance abusers with 14.95 ± 02.50 years as mean age of initiation of the substance abuse. Major factors to initiate substance abuse were enjoyment and peer pressure. Age (p=0.02), Male gender (p=0.43), Illiteracy (p=43) were associated with substance abuse among homeless children.

Keywords