Olivia Maynard reports on a recent Cochrane review that investigates talking therapies for reducing alcohol consumption in illicit drug users. The reviewers found no differences in the effectiveness of different psychotherapies (motivational interviewing, brief interventions, CBT) and insufficient evidence to draw any meaningful conclusions.
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Claire Mokrysz reports on two RCTs in JAMA that find no superiority over control for brief interventions for substance misuse in primary care. A finding that casts some doubt on interventions such as motivational interviewing for unhealthy drug use in primary care patients.
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Olivia Maynard summarises a systematic review of smoking cessation interventions in the emergency setting, which highlights the poor quality and heterogenous nature of the published trials in this field.
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Stephen Wood summarises a recent cluster RCT of vocational rehabilitation in early psychosis, which finds that early intervention services need to do more to help young people with psychosis return to work.
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This new Cochrane systematic review finds that motivational interviewing has no effect on reducing alcohol-related problems or risky behaviours such as drunk driving in young people.
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The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) have recently searched for any new evidence that may be relevant to a public health guideline published in 2007; ‘Interventions to reduce substance misuse among vulnerable young people’. In this blog I summarise the new evidence that has emerged and highlight whether or not it is likely [read the full story…]
The use of motivational interviewing is increasing in dentistry and the recent SIGN guideline (Dental Elf 18th March 2014) recommended that oral health promotion interventions should be based on recognised health behaviour theory and models such as motivational interviewing. The aim of this review was to analyze the effectiveness of motivational interviewing in changing oral [read the full story…]
Alcohol use disorder is frequently comorbid with major depressive disorder, and the disease burden associated with this dual diagnosis is considerably greater than that attributed to each disorder in isolation. This creates a problem for clinicians who are trying to treat depressed problem drinkers, because many services are set up to deal with only one [read the full story…]
It is estimated that between 10% (Gunn 1991) and 39% (Brooke 1996) of prisoners in the UK are dependent on illicit drugs; and that 14.5% of male and 31% of female prisoners have serious mental health problems (Steadman 2009). Drug use can be associated with many health, social and criminological consequences; and when mental health [read the full story…]
Substance use is common in people with mental health problems, and this can have important negative consequences for health and social function. The high comorbidity of mental health problems and substance use is a major contributor to the shorter life expectancy of this population – a person with a severe mental disorder can expect to [read the full story…]
