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Gulliver SB, Zimering R, Knight J, Morissette S, Kamholz B, Meyer E, Keane T, Pennington M, Denman T, Carpenter T, Kimbrel N. Tobacco and alcohol use among firefighters during their first 3 years of service. Psychology of addictive behaviors : journal of the Society of Psychologists in Addictive Behaviors. 2018 May 1; 32(3):255-263.
Dimensions for VA is a web-based tool available to VA staff that enables detailed searches of published research and research projects. Firefighters constitute an understudied occupational group that are exposed to a great deal of occupational stress including potentially traumatic stress. As such, higher prevalence rates of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and substance use disorders have been observed within this population; however, very little is known about the trajectories of health-risk behaviors among firefighters in response to occupational stress over time. The present study enrolled 322 fire service recruits from 7 urban U.S. professional fire departments and followed them through the first 3 years of service. All enrollees were free of Axis I psychopathology at the time of baseline assessments, which were conducted while participants were still enrolled in the fire academy. We hypothesized that: (a) firefighters who used tobacco would have higher levels of alcohol use over time; and (b) firefighters with higher levels of traumatic exposure and mental health symptoms would evidence a stronger multisubstance risk pattern. Analyses provided support for our first hypothesis and revealed that depressive symptoms (but neither trauma exposure nor PTSD symptoms) moderated the alcohol-tobacco relationship. The clinical and public safety implications of these results are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record
