We contend that one important and overlooked site where the gendering of substance consumption and addiction is taking place is through AOD research itself: in particular, through the addiction screening and diagnostic tools designed to measure and track substance consumption and problems within populations.
These studies considered only a single substance consumption and involved relatively small samples of young participants in regional settings.
An issue still requiring light concerns the pathways by which socio-demographic characteristics, stressful events, substance consumption and IPV relate to each other, and in tandem, to the lack of psychological well-being in the postpartum period.
The TEND by Night project is a large, multi-centric European survey that has been primarily designed to evaluate the association between alcohol and psychoactive substance consumption and driving ability in young people.
The relationship between life events and women's mental health in the postpartum period is also well established [ 19, 20, 22] and research shows that stressful experiences tend to precede substance consumption and intimate partner violence (IPV) in the context of women's mental disabilities [ 21, 23].
This is also in line with the work by Kilbourne et al. [ 16], who observed a negative association between substance consumption and the mental domain of the HRQOL in bipolar patients, even after controlling for the depressive and manic symptoms of the disorder.
As mentioned, two naturalistic studies have prospectively evaluated the potential relationship between alcohol and other psychoactive substances consumption with driving impairment indicators in recreational places [ 22, 23].
Other data on substances consumption registered for different psychiatric diagnoses were suggestive and worthy of interest despite being limited by the smallness of the subgroups.
As for psychoactive substances consumption, the overall lifetime prevalence was 9.4%95(95 % CI: 8.35 %–10.47 %).
Further studies could be useful to understand if e-cigarettes could be a marker for proneness or vulnerability to sensation seeking and substance consumption, including alcohol and nicotine, given their widespread use among young nonsmokers [ 55], which is often not part of a smoking quit plan [ 56].
