We employed two distinct analytic approaches to evaluate the extent to which alcohol dependence is related to the unique versus shared components of a set of common internalizing disorders. Both approaches indicate that knowing the overall internalizing psychopathology load provides more information about the likelihood of having alcohol dependence than does knowing whether a particular internalizing disorder is or is not present. In this nationally representative sample, having any particular internalizing disorder (in the last 12-months or over one’s lifetime) actually provided little or no predictive information regarding the likelihood of having alcohol dependence once the level of internalizing psychopathology load was factored into the equations. These findings suggest that the strong associations found between individual internalizing disorders and alcohol dependence in multiple epidemiological and clinical datasets (Grant et al., 2004b; Kushner et al., 2000) actually reflects a recycling of essentially the same statistical association across a number of bivariate diagnostic pairings. It would appear, therefore, that the reason each internalizing disorder has been found to correlate with alcohol dependence is because they each provide a rather blunt proxy measure
