Alexithymia among long-term drug users: a pilot study in Oporto
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Increasing scientific evidence supports an association between alexithymia and psychoactive substance use. This study explores alexithymia´s expression in sample of long-term drug users, undergoing outpatient treatment in public health units in Oporto, Portugal, as well as its´ association with social demographic risk factors. Data was collected from a sample of 90 adults, participants, mainly men (n=90; 87%), considered to be old consumers (81% with a age>40 years), with a mean age of 46.1 years (SD=8.3; range=21–64).Two instruments were used: a sociodemographic questionnaire and the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20). More than 51.1% of the individuals were alexithymic, indicating a high prevalence of deficits in emotional awareness. The treatment period varied from 0 to 15 years, included a medication in 55% of cases, mostly methadone (83%). This profile illustrates the gradual aging of the long-term users of illicit drugs and alcohol with a clear diagnosis of an emotional disorder. Therefore, clinicians who develop treatment strategies may want to take into account the likelihood that many of their patients may be alexithymic; in being so, they should integrate specific psychotherapeutic techniques that promote both the identification and the differentiation in emotionally dysfunctional patients.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".