Mediatory role of spirituality in mental health and tendency toward drug use

Mental health and addiction problems have caused a number of important issues, including physical, economic, psychological and other harms to students. The purpose of this article is to formulate a model for predicting mental health and drug use tendency with regard to the mediating role of spirituality. This study is of descriptive-analytic nature using structural equation. The statistical population of this study consisted of all undergraduate students studying at Ilam University of Applied Sciences in 2017-2018. A total of 86 students were selected by simple random sampling. The research tools included researcher-made demographic checklist, spirituality questionnaire, Goldenberg mental health questionnaire, and addiction tendency. The data were analyzed through regression coefficient and structural equations. In this study, all ethical considerations were observed and the authors of the article have not reported any conflicts of interest. The results showed that there is a significant relationship between mental health and spirituality (P<0.05; t=4.2), as well as between spirituality and drug use tendency (P<0.05; t=2.45). Also, there was a significant relationship between mental health and drug addiction tendency (P<0.05; t=7.33). Besides, there was a meaningful relationship between mental health and drug addiction tendency; mental health directly affects students' drug use tendency and also indirectly affects the tendency toward drug use through mediator of spirituality. In general, it can be said that spirituality as a component can explain mental health and tendency to use narcotic drugs, which can be increased by raising the spirituality level by organizing workshops for this purpose.