Thursday, September 25, 2003

Developing Competitive SAMHSA Grant Applications
A manual from SAMHSA, based on a workshop "...designed to reach potential community-based grantees and prepare them with the knowledge and practice to articulate comprehensively and attend to the detail required to prepare competitive, well-developed, Federal grant applications." The manual is also available as a series of MS Word files.  
  

Chronic Disease Demands Different Treatment, Research Approach
A September 18 feature article at the Join Together site - "Researcher Tom McLellan has long contended that positive addiction-treatment outcomes shouldn't be about abstinence alone, but should factor in a broad range of improvements in areas such as family life, employment, and decreased involvement with law enforcement and the justice system. Addiction treatment, he contends, should be held to the same standards of success used to judge treatment of other chronic diseases, such as diabetes, hypertension, and asthma, where relapse and noncompliance with therapy and medication are common. But addiction researchers have made the mistake of trying to evaluate treatment as if they were dealing with an acute disorder, not a chronic one, said McLellan, scientific director of the Treatment Research Institute at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine."  
  

Spotlight on Remission: Achieving an Evidence-Based Goal in Depression and Anxiety Disorders
A Medscape CME unit available as either text or a webcast "to examine the clinical challenges and evidence-based perspectives associated with achieving remission in depression and anxiety disorders." [Viewing Medscape resources requires registration, which is free].  
  

16th European College of Neuropsychopharmacology Congress
Medscape coverage of selected sessions of the congress held in Prague. See, especially, Psychoeducation: A Newsmaker Interview With Eduard Vieta ("The strategy provides skills to patients to help them cope with their illness and to avoid relapses by understanding the need for taking their treatments, to help them detect the early warning signs of relapse, and to help them develop well-structured habits"), Increased Antidepressant Use Link to Fall in Suicide Rates and Management of Weight Gain in Bipolar Disorder: A Newsmaker Interview With Joseph Calabrese. [Viewing Medscape resources requires registration, which is free].  
  

Who Enrolls In A Program For Parents Of Publicly Insured Children?
Health Affairs article - "Although interest in expanding SCHIP coverage to parents has grown over the past five years, few such expansions have actually been implemented. State governments and health plan administrators remain concerned that these expansions will attract only high-risk enrollees, resulting in costly premiums that require large subsidies. We examine characteristics of enrollees in an SCHIP-like expansion program in Alameda County, California. According to our survey data, the program did not experience unfavorable selection. Rather, it attracted a broad range of eligible adults. Enrollees were comparable to the overall low-income population in Alameda County in terms of age, health status, and various utilization measures." The article is also available in Adobe Acrobat format.  
  

Supported housing for the homeless is more efffective, but also more costly
Yale University press release - "The combination of subsidized housing and intensive case management for homeless people with mental illness keeps many more people off the street, but at an additional cost of $45 per day housed, or approximately $2,000 a year, according to a Yale study. The study comes at a time of national policy discussions about provision of permanent subsidized housing for the homeless. In fact, President George W. Bush set a goal of ending chronic homelessness in 10 years. Advocates of this approach proposed that decreased expenditure of shelter resources, health care and criminal justice services would offset the additional cost of the program. The Yale study published this month in the Archives of General Psychiatry is the first to examine this hypothesis and suggests that costs may increase, although modestly."