Monday, September 27, 2004

Evidence-Based Practices: Shaping Mental Health Services Toward Recovery
Cecile Douglas of SAMHSA wrote to call our attention to these "tool kits" - " The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) and its Center for Mental Health Services (CMHS) are pleased to introduce six Evidence-Based Practice Implementation Resource Kits to encourage the use of evidence-based practices in mental health. The Kits were developed as one of several SAMHSA/CMHS activities critical to its science-to-services strategy. We expect to identify additional practices for future Kits."  
  

Risk & Protective Factors for Substance Use Among American Indian or Alaska Native Youths
A new SAMHSA report, available from this page in both HTML and Acrobat formats - "SAMHSA's National Survey on Drug Use and Health combined data from 2002 and 2003 to examine three categories of risk factors for substance use (individual/peers, family, and school). These risk factors were compared between American Indian or Alaska Native youth and other racial and ethnic groups. These estimates are based on 46,310 respondents aged 12 to 17, representing a national population of 25 million youth. Nationally, there are an estimated 183,000 American Indian or Alaska Native youths aged 12 to 17. American Indian or Alaska Native youths were more likely than other youths to perceive moderate to no risk associated with substance use, to perceive their parents as not strongly disapproving of their substance use, and to believe that all or most of the students in their school get drunk at least once a week."  
  

APA Testimony On Behalf of New Mexico’s Important Step Toward Comprehensive Mental Health Care
APA press release - "Russ Newman, the American Psychological Association’s (APA) executive director for professional practice, testified before New Mexico’s Psychologist Examiner’s Board in support of regulations that would implement the state’s new law granting prescriptive authority to psychologists. New Mexico was the first state to enact a law granting psychologists the right to prescribe. Seeing a psychiatrist in New Mexico can take up to six weeks and an hours long commute. HB 170 and the regulations to implement it will expand the pool of mental health care providers by providing additional training in medicine and pharmacology to psychologists who are already experienced clinicians with doctoral level training..."  
  

Adopting Evidence-Based Treatments
Psychiatric Times article - "Evidence-based treatment has not always been a common model in the field of psychiatry. Its popularity has grown over the last five years, though, as the body of scientific evidence into mental health has grown as well."  
  

Addressing the Interface Between Pediatrics and Psychiatry
Psychiatric Times article - "...collaboration between pediatrics and psychiatry has been a topic of interest, discussion and annoyance for half a century, not only in the United States, but also in a host of different countries and cultures. Parallel systems of care for pediatric physical and mental health problems persist despite recommendations to better integrate existing research-based knowledge into routine clinical practice (e.g., U.S. Public Health Service, 2000). Yet despite several "botched beginnings" between the disciplines and the imperfect nature of existing knowledge and practice, there truly is reason for hope. Psychiatry and its affiliated disciplines now offer a better product that is increasingly relevant to the pediatricians and family physicians who are being called on to manage youths with mental disorders in traditional medical settings."  
  

Does Residential Treatment Impact Pharmacotherapy in Children and Adolescents?
Psychiatric Times article - "There appears to be a subgroup of children and adolescents who, despite repeated brief hospitalizations, do not improve, but along the way, these patients accumulate medications. During long-term residential treatment, however, these patients do improve and their medications are reduced."  
  

Mental health problems in assisted living residents higher than expected
Indiana University press release at EurekAlert - "The first large scale comparative study of the mental health of assisted living residents has found a higher rate than expected of a range of mental health problems in this rapidly growing population. The study which, appears in the October issue of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, reports that two thirds of 2100 assisted living residents studied exhibited mental health problem indicators. Half suffered from dementia and a quarter exhibited indicators of depression. More than half the assisted living residents studied took psychotropic medications including antipsychotics, antidepressants or sedatives. "