SAMHSA Medical Officer Melinda Campopiano addresses concerns about provider care and prescription drugs raised by a recent TEDS Report on benzodiazepene and narcotic pain reliever treatment admissions.
What needs to be considered by providers when they’re prescribing drugs that can lead to misuse or addiction?
Judgment is crucial, but having accurate information upon which to base one’s judgment is a necessary first step.
How does a provider fulfill this “necessary first step” and obtain accurate information?
The APA guidelines recommend all patients be screened for substance use disorders prior to being prescribed psychiatric …
Increasingly, multiple federal agencies representing various service sectors have recognized the impact of trauma on the children, adults, and families they serve. In 2011, in its strategic action plan, SAMHSA designated Trauma as one of its key initiatives. This led SAMHSA to revisit its trauma-related concepts and programming and their applicability not only to behavioral health but to other related fields.
In May 2012, after an extensive literature and policy review, SAMHSA convened a group of national experts to assist in the development of a working definition of trauma and trauma-informed …
By Larke Huang and Paolo del Vecchio
Too often, children and youth with mental, emotional and behavioral disorders are subject to seclusion and restraint (SR) in settings that are intended to help children and promote their healthy development.
Once thought to be “therapeutic” techniques, we now recognize these as non-therapeutic, often re-traumatizing for the youth, and disruptive of a therapeutic relationship. Use of restraints can often result in injuries to both the child and the staff and even deaths.
A front page article in today’s Washington Post reported on allegations of the repeated …
By: Andrew Wilson, SAMHSA Office of Communications
At SAMHSA, our Web improvement efforts center around a “customer first” approach in everything we do. Much of our recent work focused on understanding how information on the agency’s website should be organized and prioritized.
How are we doing this? A variety of tools and techniques are helping us meet this goal, such as directly soliciting feedback from customers via comments and card sorting exercises, using trending social media stories to identify what issues may be of greatest interest to SAMHSA customers, and examining website …
Parents and educators may play critical role in prevention
By Angela Sivak
We’ve just released a report on how synthetic marijuana accounted for 11,406 visits to hospital Emergency Departments in 2010.
CBS News, U.S. News and World Report, WebMD and The Hill have all reported on the new data.
So what’s all the fuss about?
Synthetic marijuana, while different from authentic marijuana, can still have a negative impact on your health. Our Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) reported that the use of this drug has been linked to high blood pressure, increased heart rate, …