The weekly Research Update contains the latest news, journal articles, and useful links from around the web. Some of this week's topics include:
● Unveiling the Structure in Mental Disorder Presentations.
● Heavy Versus Light Smoking: Its Association With Opioid Use, Chronic Pain, and Mental Health.
● Reasons for Gun Ownership Among Demographically Diverse New and Prior Gun Owners.
By show of hands, how many of us encounter clients that are struggling with substance abuse and addiction in the midst of dealing with other mental health issues? Ok, this is a blog, so of course I can’t see your hands, but I am imagining a wall of hands in the air of everyone reading this. And of course that is because substance use disorders are highly co-morbid with other mental health conditions. If you’re like me, having received training in several evidence-based psychotherapies for various conditions, you may not have a lot of experience or training in how to treat or manage co-morbid substance use disorders (SUD). This can be particularly true regarding the addition of medication-assisted therapist (MAT) for SUD.
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Factor by which active service members and veterans with a combat-related traumatic brain injury (TBI) are "more likely to attempt suicide than those without a TBI," according to a study recently published in the journal Military Psychology -- The Purple Heart and suicide risk in Post-9/11 U.S. Army Combat Veterans with a traumatic brain injury: A mixed methods study.
The weekly Research Update contains the latest news, journal articles, and useful links from around the web. Some of this week's topics include:
● Gun Carrying Among Military-Connected Youth With Past-Year Suicidal Ideation and Suicide Plans.
● Youth Suicide and Preceding Mental Health Diagnosis.
● Suicide in US Preteens Aged 8 to 12 Years, 2001 to 2022.
A few months ago, I was treating a patient with PTSD, but after greater exploration of his distress, which included guilt, shame, and feeling betrayed by his military boss, we fleshed out that moral injury was a salient part of his clinical picture. Currently, there is no consensus in the field on the exact definition of moral injury, but one I like refers to it as “enduring psychosocial and spiritual harms following exposures to high-stakes events that involve transgressions of one’s deeply held moral convictions or beliefs of right and wrong through one’s own or others’ action or inaction, or perceived betrayal by those in positions of authority or trust” (Phelps et al., 2022).