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What is Anal Retentiveness?

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Introduction

An anal retentive person is a person who pays such attention to detail that it becomes an obsession and may be an annoyance to others.

The term derives from Freudian psychoanalysis.

Origins

In Freudian psychology, the anal stage is said to follow the oral stage of infant or early-childhood development. This is a time when an infant’s attention moves from oral stimulation to anal stimulation (usually the bowels but occasionally the bladder), usually synchronous with learning to control its excretory functions – in other words, any form of child training and not specifically linked to toilet training. Freud posited that children who experience conflicts, in which libido energy is under-indulged during this period of time, and the child is perhaps too strongly chastised for toilet-training accidents, may develop “anal retentive” fixations or personality traits. These traits are associated with a child’s efforts at excretory control: orderliness, stubbornness, and compulsions for control. Conversely, those who are overindulged during this period may develop “anal-expulsive” personality types.

Influence and Refutation

Freud’s theories on early childhood have been influential on the psychological community; the phrase anal retentive and the term anal survive in common usage. The second edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-II) introduced obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD), with a definition based on Freud’s description of anal-retentive personality. But the association between OCPD and toilet training is largely regarded as unsupported “pop-psychology” and therefore discredited by the majority of psychologists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. There is no conclusive research linking anal stage conflicts with “anal” personality types.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anal_retentiveness >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

On This Day … 24 July [2022]

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People (Deaths)

  • 2007 – Albert Ellis, American psychologist and author (b. 1913).
  • 2013 – Virginia E. Johnson, American psychologist and sexologist (b. 1925).

Albert Ellis

Albert Ellis (27 September 1913 to 24 July 2007) was an American psychologist and psychotherapist who founded rational emotive behaviour therapy (REBT). He held MA and PhD degrees in clinical psychology from Columbia University, and was certified by the American Board of Professional Psychology (ABPP). He also founded, and was the President of, the New York City-based Albert Ellis Institute. He is generally considered to be one of the originators of the cognitive revolutionary paradigm shift in psychotherapy and an early proponent and developer of cognitive-behavioural therapies.

Based on a 1982 professional survey of US and Canadian psychologists, he was considered the second most influential psychotherapist in history (Carl Rogers ranked first in the survey; Sigmund Freud was ranked third). Psychology Today noted that, “No individual—not even Freud himself—has had a greater impact on modern psychotherapy.”

Virginia E. Johnson

Virginia E. Johnson (born Mary Virginia Eshelman; 11 February 1925 to 24 July 2013) was an American sexologist and a member of the Masters and Johnson sexuality research team.

Along with her partner, William H. Masters, she pioneered research into the nature of human sexual response and the diagnosis and treatment of sexual dysfunctions and disorders from 1957 until the 1990s.

On This Day … 23 July [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1933 – Benedict Groeschel, American priest, psychologist, and talk show host (d. 2014).

Benedict Groeschel

Benedict Joseph Groeschel, C.F.R. (23 July 1933 to 03 October 2014) was an American Franciscan friar, Catholic priest, retreat master, author, psychologist, activist, and television host. He hosted the television talk programme Sunday Night Prime (originally Sunday Night Live) broadcast on the Eternal Word Television Network, as well as several serial religious specials.

He founded the Office for Spiritual Development for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York. He was Associate Director of the Trinity Retreat House for clergy and executive director of St. Francis House. He was professor of pastoral psychology at St. Joseph’s Seminary in New York and an adjunct professor at the Institute for Psychological Sciences in Arlington, Virginia. He was one of the founders of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal and among his close friends were Mother Teresa, Mother Angelica and Alice von Hildebrand.

What is the Pollyanna Principle?

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Introduction

The Pollyanna principle (also called Pollyannaism or positivity bias) is the tendency for people to remember pleasant items more accurately than unpleasant ones.

Research indicates that at the subconscious level, the mind tends to focus on the optimistic; while at the conscious level, it tends to focus on the negative. This subconscious bias is similar to the Barnum effect.

What is the Barnum Effect?

The Barnum effect, also called the Forer effect or, less commonly, the Barnum-Forer effect, is a common psychological phenomenon whereby individuals give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically to them, yet which are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people.

Development

The name derives from the 1913 novel Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter describing a girl who plays the “glad game” – trying to find something to be glad about in every situation. The novel has been adapted to film several times, most famously in 1920 and 1960. An early use of the name “Pollyanna” in psychological literature was in 1969 by Boucher and Osgood who described a Pollyanna hypothesis as a universal human tendency to use positive words more frequently and diversely than negative words in communicating. Empirical evidence for this tendency has been provided by computational analyses of large corpora of text.

The story of Pollyanna is about an orphaned little girl, who is sent to live with her Aunt Polly, who is known for being stiff, strict, and proper. When thrown into this environment, Pollyanna seeks to keep and spread her optimism to others. This beloved literary character’s story shares the message that despite how hard things may seem, a sunny disposition can turn anyone and anything around.

Psychological Research and Findings

The Pollyanna principle was described by Margaret Matlin and David Stang in 1978 using the archetype of Pollyanna more specifically as a psychological principle which portrays the positive bias people have when thinking of the past (aka nostalgia). According to the Pollyanna principle, the brain processes information that is pleasing and agreeable in a more precise and exact manner as compared to unpleasant information. We actually tend to remember past experiences as more rosy than they actually occurred. The researchers found that people expose themselves to positive stimuli and avoid negative stimuli, they take longer to recognise what is unpleasant or threatening than what is pleasant and safe, and they report that they encounter positive stimuli more frequently than they actually do. Matlin and Stang also determined that selective recall was a more likely occurrence when recall was delayed: the longer the delay, the more selective recall that occurred.

The Pollyanna principle has been observed on online social networks as well. For example, Twitter users preferentially share more, and are emotionally affected more frequently by, positive information.

However, the only exception to the Pollyanna principle tends to be individuals suffering from depression or anxiety, who are more likely to either have more depressive realism or a negative bias.

Positivity Bias

Positivity bias is the part of the Pollyanna principle that attributes reasons to why people may choose positivity over negative or realistic mindsets. In positive psychology, it is broken down into three ideas: positive illusions, self deception, and optimism. Having a positive bias increases with age, as it is more prevalent in adults approaching older adulthood than younger children or adolescents. Older adults tend to pay attention to positive information, and this could be due to a specific focus in cognitive processing. In studies compiled by Andrew Reed and Laura Carstensen, they found that older adults (in comparison to younger adults) purposefully directed their attention away from negative material.

Criticisms

Although the Pollyanna principle can be seen as helpful in some situations, some psychologists say it may inhibit an individual from coping effectively with life obstacles. The Pollyanna principle in some instances can be known as “Pollyanna syndrome” and is defined by such sceptics as a person who is excessively positive and blind towards the negative or real. In regards to therapy or counselling, it is viewed as dangerous to both the therapist and patient.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollyanna_principle >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

What is a Self-Report Inventory?

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Introduction

A self-report inventory is a type of psychological test in which a person fills out a survey or questionnaire with or without the help of an investigator.

Self-report inventories often ask direct questions about personal interests, values, symptoms, behaviours, and traits or personality types. Inventories are different from tests in that there is no objectively correct answer; responses are based on opinions and subjective perceptions. Most self-report inventories are brief and can be taken or administered within five to 15 minutes, although some, such as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), can take several hours to fully complete. They are popular because they can be inexpensive to give and to score, and their scores can often show good reliability.

There are three major approaches to developing self-report inventories:

  • Theory-guided inventories are constructed around a theory of personality or a prototype of a construct.
  • Factor analysis uses statistical methods to organize groups of related items into subscales.
  • Criterion-keyed inventories include questions that have been shown to statistically discriminate between a comparison group and a criterion group, such as people with clinical diagnoses of depression versus a control group.

Items may use any of several formats: a Likert scale with ranked options, true-false, or forced choice, although other formats such as sentence completion or visual analogue scales are possible. True-false involves questions that the individual denotes as either being true or false about themselves. Forced-choice is a set of statements that require the individual to choose one as being most representative of themselves.

If the inventory includes items from different factors or constructs, the items can be mixed together or kept in groups. Sometimes the way people answer the item will change depending on the context offered by the neighbouring items.

Personality Inventories

Self-report personality inventories include questions dealing with behaviours, responses to situations, characteristic thoughts and beliefs, habits, symptoms, and feelings. Test-takers-are usually asked to indicate how well each item describes themselves or how much they agree with each item. Formats are varied, from adjectives such as “warm”, to sentences such as “I like parties”, or reports of behaviour “I have driven past the speed limit” and response formats from yes/no to Likert scales, to continuous “slider” responses. Some inventories are global, such as the NEO, others focus on particular domains, such as anger or aggression.

Problems

Unlike IQ tests where there are correct answers that have to be worked out by test takers, for personality, attempts by test-takers to gain particular scores are an issue in applied testing. Test items are often transparent, and people may “figure out” how to respond to make themselves appear to possess whatever qualities they think an organisation wants. In addition, people may falsify good responses, be biased towards their positive characteristics, or falsify bad, stressing negative characteristics, in order to obtain their preferred outcome. In clinical settings patients may exaggerate symptoms in order to make their situation seem worse, or under-report the severity or frequency of symptoms in order to minimise their problems. For this reason, self-report inventories are not used in isolation to diagnose a mental disorder, often used as screeners for verification by other assessment data. Many personality tests, such as the MMPI or the MBTI add questions that are designed to make it difficult for a person to exaggerate traits and symptoms. They are in common use for measuring levels of traits, or for symptom severity and change. Clinical discretion is advised for all self-report inventories.

Items may differ in social desirability, which can cause different scores for people at the same level of a trait, but differing in their desire to appear to possess socially desirable behaviours.

Popular Self-Report Inventories

  • 16 PF.
  • Beck Anxiety Inventory.
  • Beck Depression Inventory.
  • Beck Hopelessness Scale.
  • California Psychological Inventory (CPI).
  • CORE-OM.
  • Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ-R).
  • Geriatric Depression Scale.
  • Major Depression Inventory.
  • Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory.
  • Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.
  • NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-3).
  • Outcome Questionnaire 45.
  • PSYCHLOPS.
  • State-Trait Anxiety Inventory.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-report_inventory >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

On This Day … 22 July [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1881 – Augusta Fox Bronner, American psychologist, specialist in juvenile psychology (d. 1966).
  • 1893 – Karl Menninger, American psychiatrist and author (d. 1990).

People (Deaths)

  • 2012 – George Armitage Miller, American psychologist and academic (b. 1920).

Augusta Fox Bronner

Augusta Fox Bronner (22 July 1881 to 11 December 1966) was an American psychologist, best known for her work in juvenile psychology.

She co-directed the first child guidance clinic, and her research shaped psychological theories about the causes behind child delinquency, emphasizing the need to focus on social and environmental factors over inherited traits.

In 1913, while taking a summer course at Harvard University, Bronner met Chicago neurologist and professor William Healy. Healy was equally interested in the study of child delinquency, and subsequently hired Bronner to work as a psychologist at his Chicago Juvenile Psychopathic Institute. In 1914, the institute was renamed the Psychopathic Clinic of the Juvenile Court, and Bronner soon became the assistant director. Bronner and Healy proceeded to shape the study and treatment of delinquent youth, contributing to the scientific understanding that most juvenile crime stemmed from “mental repressions, social conflicts, and family relations”, not hereditary factors. Among other research, Bronner identified that delinquency often arose as a result of placing children with learning disabilities or special abilities in the wrong kinds of educational environments.

In 1917, Bronner and Healy took up new positions at the Judge Baker Foundation of Boston (later the Judge Baker Children’s Centre), a new publicly funded child guidance clinic attached to the Boston juvenile court. Bronner handled most of the psychological examinations of youth, as well as interviews with girls and the youngest children. In 1927, Bronner and Healy wrote the influential Manual of Individual Mental Tests and Testing, a comprehensive guide to assessing a patient’s mental state. Although Healy was originally given the full position of director, with Bronner acting as assistant director, Bronner eventually became co-director of the Foundation in 1930. The Judge Baker Foundation soon became a model for other child guidance clinics across the country, with its co-directors developing important psychiatric practices such as the “team” method, in which psychologists worked together with social workers and physicians to treat a patient.

On 19 November 1930, Bronner and Healy were invited by President Herbert Hoover to attend the White House Conference on Child Health and Protection.

During the 1930s, Bronner also worked briefly in New Haven, Connecticut, as Director of the short-lived Research Institute of Human Relations at Yale University. She was president of the American Orthopsychiatric Association in 1932.

Karl Menninger

Karl Augustus Menninger (22 July 1893 to 18 July 1990) was an American psychiatrist and a member of the Menninger family of psychiatrists who founded the Menninger Foundation and the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas.

George Armitage Miller

George Armitage Miller (03 February 1920 to 22 July 2012) was an American psychologist who was one of the founders of cognitive psychology, and more broadly, of cognitive science. He also contributed to the birth of psycholinguistics. Miller wrote several books and directed the development of WordNet, an online word-linkage database usable by computer programs. He authored the paper, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two,” in which he observed that many different experimental findings considered together reveal the presence of an average limit of seven for human short-term memory capacity. This paper is frequently cited by psychologists and in the wider culture. Miller won numerous awards, including the National Medal of Science.

Miller began his career when the reigning theory in psychology was behaviourism, which eschewed the study of mental processes and focused on observable behaviour. Rejecting this approach, Miller devised experimental techniques and mathematical methods to analyse mental processes, focusing particularly on speech and language. Working mostly at Harvard University, MIT and Princeton University, he went on to become one of the founders of psycholinguistics and was one of the key figures in founding the broader new field of cognitive science, circa 1978. He collaborated and co-authored work with other figures in cognitive science and psycholinguistics, such as Noam Chomsky. For moving psychology into the realm of mental processes and for aligning that move with information theory, computation theory, and linguistics, Miller is considered one of the great twentieth-century psychologists. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Miller as the 20th most cited psychologist of that era.

What was TeenScreen?

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Introduction

The TeenScreen National Centre for Mental Health Checkups at Columbia University was a national mental health and suicide risk screening initiative for middle- and high-school age adolescents.

On 15 November 2012, according to its website, the programme was terminated. The organisation operated as a centre in the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Department at Columbia University, in New York City.

The programme was developed at Columbia University in 1999, and launched nationally in 2003. Screening was voluntary and offered through doctors’ offices, schools, clinics, juvenile justice facilities, and other youth-serving organisations and settings. As of August 2011, the programme had more than 2,000 active screening sites across 46 states in the United States, and in other countries including Australia, Brazil, India and New Zealand.

Screening Programme

Organisation

The programme was developed by a team of researchers at Columbia University, led by David Shaffer. The goal was to make researched and validated screening questionnaires available for voluntary identification of possible mental disorders and suicide risk in middle and high school students. The questionnaire they developed is known as the Columbia Suicide Screen, which entered into use in 1999, an early version of what is now the Columbia Health Screen. In 2003, the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, created under the administration of George W. Bush, identified the TeenScreen program as a “model” programme and recommended adolescent mental health screening become common practice.

The organisation launched an initiative to provide voluntary mental health screening to all US teens in 2003. The following year, TeenScreen was included in the national Suicide Prevention Resource Centre’s (SPRC) list of evidence-based suicide prevention programmes. In 2007, it was included as an evidence-based programme in the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)’s National Registry of Evidence-based Programmes and Practices. In 2009, the organisation launched the TeenScreen Primary Care initiative to increase mental health screening by paediatricians and other primary care providers, the same year the US Preventive Services Task Force recommended annual adolescent mental health screening as part of routine primary care, and the Institute of Medicine recommended expansion of prevention and early identification programmes.

As of 2011, the programme was led by executive director Laurie Flynn, deputy executive director Leslie McGuire and scientific advisor Mark Olfson, M.D., alongside a National Advisory Council of healthcare professionals, educators and advocates.

As of 15 November 2012, TeenScreen has been terminated, will no longer train or register new programmes, and will cease all operations by the end of the year.

Mission and Locations

The mission of the TeenScreen National Centre was to expand and improve the early identification of mental health problems in youth. In particular, TeenScreen aimed to find young people at risk of suicide or developing mental health disorders so they could be referred for a comprehensive mental health evaluation by a health professional. The programme focuses on providing screening to young people in the 11-18 age range. From 2003 until 2012, the programme was offered nationally in schools, clinics, doctors’ offices and in youth service environments such as shelters and juvenile justice settings. As of August 2011, more than 2,000 primary care providers, schools and community-based sites in 46 states offered adolescent mental health screening through the TeenScreen National Centre. In addition, the screening was also being provided in other countries including Australia, Brazil, India, New Zealand and Scotland.

Screening Process

TeenScreen provided materials, training and technical help through its TeenScreen Primary Care and Schools and Communities programmes for primary care providers, schools and youth-serving organisations that provided mental health screening to adolescents. A toolkit was provided, including researched and validated questionnaires, instructions for administering, scoring and interpreting the screening responses. Primary care programme materials included information on primary care referrals for clinical evaluation. In the school and community setting, the screening process was voluntary and required active parental consent and participant assent prior to screening sessions.

The validated questionnaires included items about depression, thoughts of suicide and attempts, anxiety, and substance use. The screening questionnaires typically took up to ten minutes for an adolescent to complete. Once the responses to the questionnaire had been reviewed, any adolescent identified as being at possible risk for suicide or other mental health concerns would then assessed by a health or mental health professional. The result of this assessment determined whether the adolescent could be referred for mental health services. If this was the case, parents were involved and provided with help locating the appropriate mental health services.

Research, Endorsements and Responses

Recommendations and Research

Mental health screening has been endorsed by the former US Surgeon General David Satcher, who launched a “Call to Action” in 1999 encouraging the development and implementation of safe, effective school-based programmes offering intervention, help and support to young people with mental health issues. TeenScreen is included as an evidence-based programme in the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)’s National Registry of Evidence-based Programs and Practices as a scientifically tested and reviewed intervention. In addition, the US Preventive Services Task Force recommended in 2009 that mental health screening for teenagers be integrated into routine primary care appointments.

Studies have been conducted on the effectiveness and impact of mental health screening for young people. In a 2004 systematic evidence review, the US Preventive Services Task Force found that there were no studies that addressed whether screening as part of primary care reduced morbidity and mortality, nor any information of the potential risks of screening. In a later review, published in 2009, the task force found that there was evidence supporting the efficacy of screening tools in identifying teenagers at risk of suicide or mental health disorders.

A team of researchers from Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute completed a randomised controlled clinical trial on the impact of suicide screening on high school students in New York State from 2002-2004. The study found that students who were given a questionnaire about suicide were no more likely to report suicidal thoughts after the survey than students in the control group who had not been questioned. Neither was there any greater risk for “high risk” students. A subsequent study by the researchers, in 2009, found that screening appeared to increase the likelihood that adolescents would receive treatment if they were at risk for mental health disorders or suicide.

A study published in 2011, involving 2,500 high school students, examined the value of routine mental health screening in school to identify adolescents at-risk for mental illness, and to connect those adolescents with recommended follow-up care. The research, conducted between 2005 and 2009 at six public high schools in suburban Wisconsin, found that nearly three out of four high school students identified as being at-risk for having a mental health problem were not in treatment at the time of screening. Of those students identified as at-risk, a significant majority (76.3%) completed at least one visit with a mental health provider within 90 days of screening. More than half (56.3%) received minimally adequate treatment, defined as having three or more visits with a provider, or any number of visits if termination was agreed to by the provider.

A separate study published in 2011, found that mental health screening was effective at connecting African-American middle school students from a predominantly low-income area with school-based mental health services. Researchers have also found evidence to support the addition of mental health screenings for adolescents while undergoing routine physical examinations.

Acceptance and Critical Responses

Recommendations endorsing adolescent mental health screening have been issued by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and the US Preventative Services Task Force (USPSTF). The American Academy of Paediatrics recommends assessment of mental health at primary care visits and suggests the use of validating screening instruments. These add to statements and recommendations to screen adolescents for mental illness from the American Medical Association (AMA), the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine, the American Academy of Family Physicians and the National Association of Paediatric Nurse Practitioners. TeenScreen has been endorsed by a number of organizations, including the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, and federal and state commissions such as the New Freedom Commission.

There is opposition to mental health screening programmes in general and TeenScreen in particular, from civil liberties, parental rights, and politically conservative groups. Much of the opposition is led by groups who claim that the organization is funded by the pharmaceutical industry; however, in 2011, an inquiry launched by Senator Charles E. Grassley into the funding of health advocacy groups by pharmaceutical, medical-device, and insurance companies demonstrated to Senator Grassley’s satisfaction that TeenScreen does not receive funding from the pharmaceutical industry. Senator Grassley sent a letter to TeenScreen and 33 other organisations like the American Cancer Society asking about their financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry. TeenScreen replied saying they did not accept money from medical companies.

In 2005, TeenScreen was criticised following media coverage of a suit filed a local screening programme in Indiana by the parents of a teenager who had taken part in screening. The suit alleged that the screening had taken place without parents’ permissions. The complaint led to a change in how parental consent was handled by TeenScreen sites. In 2006, the programme’s policy was amended so that active rather than passive consent was required from parents before screening adolescents in a school setting.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeenScreen >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

What is the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration?

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Introduction

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) is a branch of the US Department of Health and Human Services.

It is charged with improving the quality and availability of treatment and rehabilitative services in order to reduce illness, death, disability, and the cost to society resulting from substance abuse and mental illnesses. The Administrator of SAMHSA reports directly to the Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services. SAMHSA’s headquarters building is located outside of Rockville, Maryland.

Brief History

SAMHSA was established in 1992 by Congress as part of a reorganisation stemming from the abolition of Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration (ADAMHA). ADAMHA had been established in 1973, combining the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). The 1992 ADAMHA Reorganisation Act consolidated the treatment functions that were previously scattered amongst the NIMH, NIAAA, and NIDA into SAMHSA, established as an agency of the Public Health Service (PHS). NIMH, NIAAA, and NIDA continued with their research functions as agencies within the National Institutes of Health.

Congress directed SAMHSA to target effectively substance abuse and mental health services to the people most in need and to translate research in these areas more effectively and rapidly into the general health care system.

Charles Curie was SAMHSA’s Director until his resignation in May 2006. In December 2006 Terry Cline was appointed as SAMHSA’s Director. Dr. Cline served through August 2008. Rear Admiral Eric Broderick served as the Acting Director upon Dr. Cline’s departure, until the arrival of the succeeding Administrator, Pamela S. Hyde, J.D. in November 2009. She resigned in August 2015 and Kana Enomoto, M.A. served as Acting Director of SAMHSA until Dr. Elinore F. McCance-Katz was appointed as the inaugural Assistant Secretary for Mental Health and Substance Abuse. The title was changed by Section 6001 of the 21st Century Cures Act.

Organisation

SAMHSA’s mission is to reduce the impact of substance abuse and mental illness on American’s communities.

Four SAMHSA offices, called Centres, administer competitive, formula, and block grant programs and data collection activities:

  • The Centre for Mental Health Services (CMHS) focuses on prevention and treatment of mental disorders.
  • The Centre for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP) seeks to reduce the abuse of illegal drugs, alcohol, and tobacco.
  • The Centre for Substance Abuse Treatment (CSAT) supports effective substance abuse treatment and recovery services.
  • The Centre for Behavioural Health Statistics and Quality (CBHSQ) collects, analyses, and publishes behaviour health data.

The Centres give grant and contracts to US states, territories, tribes, communities, and local organisations. They support the provision of quality behavioural-health services such as addiction-prevention, treatment, and recovery-support services through competitive Programmes of Regional and National Significance grants. Several staff offices support the Centres:

  • Office of the Administrator.
  • Office of Policy, Planning, and Innovation.
  • Office of Behavioural Health Equity.
  • Office of Financial Resources.
  • Office of Management, Technology, and Operations.
  • Office of Communications.
  • Office of Tribal Affairs and Policy.

Centre for Mental Health Services

The Centre for Mental Health Services (CMHS) is a unit of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) within the US Department of Health and Human Services. This US government agency describes its role as:

The Center for Mental Health Services leads federal efforts to promote the prevention and treatment of mental disorders. Congress created CMHS to bring new hope to adults who have serious mental illness and children with emotional disorders.

As of March 2016, the director of CMHS is Paolo del Vecchio.

CMHS is the driving force behind the largest US children’s mental health initiative to date, which is focused on creating and sustaining systems of care. This initiative provides grants (now cooperative agreements) to States, political subdivisions of States, territories, Indian Tribes and tribal organisations to improve and expand their Systems Of Care to meet the needs of the focus population – children and adolescents with serious emotional, behavioural, or mental disorders. The Children’s Mental Health Initiative is the largest Federal commitment to children’s mental health to date, and through FY 2006, it has provided over $950 million to support SOC development in 126 communities.

Centre for Substance Abuse Prevention

The Centre for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP) aims to reduce the use of illegal substances and the abuse of legal ones.

CSAP promotes self-esteem and cultural pride as a way to reduce the attractiveness of drugs, advocates raising taxes as a way to discourage drinking alcohol by young people, develops alcohol and drug curricula, and funds research on alcohol and drug abuse prevention. CSAP encourages the use of ‘evidence-based programmes’ for drug and alcohol prevention. Evidence-based programmes are programmes that have been rigorously and scientifically evaluated to show effectiveness in reducing or preventing drug use.

Brief History and Legal Definition

CSAP was established in 1992 from the previous Office of Substance Abuse Prevention by the law called the ADAMHA Reorganisation Act. Defining regulations include those of Title 42.

Centre for Substance Abuse Treatment

The Centre for Substance Abuse Treatment (CSAT) was established in October 1992 with a Congressional mandate to expand the availability of effective treatment and recovery services for alcohol and drug problems. CSAT supports a variety of activities aimed at fulfilling its mission:

To improve the lives of individuals and families affected by alcohol and drug abuse by ensuring access to clinically sound, cost-effective addiction treatment that reduces the health and social costs to our communities and the nation.

CSAT works with States and community-based groups to improve and expand existing substance abuse treatment services under the Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment Block Grant Programme. CSAT also supports SAMHSA’s free treatment referral service to link people with the community-based substance abuse services they need. Because no single treatment approach is effective for all persons, CSAT supports the nation’s effort to provide multiple treatment modalities, evaluate treatment effectiveness, and use evaluation results to enhance treatment and recovery approaches.

Centre for Behavioural Health Statistics and Quality

The Centre for Behavioural Health Statistics and Quality (CBHSQ) conducts data collection and research on ‘behavioural health statistics’ relating to mental health, addiction, substance use, and related epidemiology. CBHSQ is headed by a Director. Subunits of CBHSQ include:

  • Office of Programme Analysis and Coordination.
  • Division of Surveillance and Data Collection.
  • Division of Evaluation, Analysis and Quality.

Regional Offices

CMS has its headquarters outside of Rockville, Maryland with 10 regional offices located throughout the US:

  • Region I – Boston, Massachusetts:
    • Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont.
  • Region II – New York, New York:
    • New York State, New Jersey, US Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.
  • Region III – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania:
    • Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia.
  • Region IV – Atlanta, Georgia:
    • Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee.
  • Region V – Chicago, Illinois:
    • Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin.
  • Region VI – Dallas, Texas:
    • Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas.
  • Region VII – Kansas City, Missouri:
    • Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska.
  • Region VIII – Denver, Colorado:
    • Colorado, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming.
  • Region IX – San Francisco, California:
    • Arizona, California, Hawaii, Nevada, American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Marina Islands.
  • Region X – Seattle, Washington:
    • Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington.

Strategic Direction

In 2010, SAMHSA identified 8 Strategic Initiatives to focus the Agency’s work. Below are the 8 areas and goals associated with each category:

  • Prevention of Substance Abuse and Mental Illness – Create prevention-prepared communities in which individuals, families, schools, workplaces, and communities take action to promote emotional health; and, to prevent and reduce mental illness, substance (including tobacco) abuse, and, suicide, across the lifespan
  • Trauma and Justice – Reduce the pervasive, harmful, and costly public-health impacts of violence and trauma by integrating trauma-informed approaches throughout health and behavioural healthcare systems; also, to divert people with substance-abuse and mental disorders away from criminal-/juvenile-justice systems, and into trauma-informed treatment and recovery.
  • Military Families – Active, Guard, Reserve, and Veteran – Support of our service men & women, and their families and communities, by leading efforts to ensure needed behavioural health services are accessible to them, and successful outcomes.
  • Health Reform – Broaden health coverage and the use of evidence-based practices to increase access to appropriate and high quality care; also, to reduce existing disparities between: the availability of substance abuse and mental disorders; and, those for other medical conditions.
  • Housing and Homelessness – To provide housing for, and to reduce the barriers to accessing recovery-sustaining programmes for, homeless persons with mental and substance abuse disorders (and their families)
  • Health Information Technology for Behavioural Health Providers – To ensure that the behavioural-health provider network – including prevention specialists and consumer providers – fully participate with the general healthcare delivery system, in the adoption of health information technology.
  • Data, Outcomes, and Quality – Demonstrating Results – Realise an integrated data strategy that informs policy, measures program impact, and results in improved quality of services and outcomes for individuals, families, and communities.
  • Public Awareness and Support – Increase understanding of mental and substance abuse prevention & treatment services, to achieve the full potential of prevention, and, to help people recognise and seek assistance for these health conditions with the same urgency as any other health condition.
  • Their budget for the Fiscal Year 2010 was about $3.6 billion. It was re-authorized for FY2011. Most recently, the FY 2016 Budget requests $3.7 billion for SAMHSA, an increase of $45 million above FY 2015.

Controversy

In February 2004, the administration was accused of requiring the name change of an Oregon mental health conference from “Suicide Prevention Among Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgender Individuals” to “Suicide Prevention in Vulnerable Populations.”

In 2002, then-President George W. Bush established the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health. The resulting report was intended to provide the foundation for the federal government’s Mental Health Services programmes. However, many experts and advocates were highly critical of its report, Achieving the Promise: Transforming Mental Health Care in America.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substance_Abuse_and_Mental_Health_Services_Administration >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

On This Day … 20 July [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1925 – Frantz Fanon, French-Algerian psychiatrist and philosopher (d. 1961).
  • 1927 – Ian P. Howard, English-Canadian psychologist and academic (d. 2013).

People (Deaths)

  • 2009 – Mark Rosenzweig, American psychologist and academic (b. 1922).

Frantz Fanon

Frantz Omar Fanon (20 July 1925 to 06 December 1961), also known as Ibrahim Frantz Fanon, was a French West Indian psychiatrist and political philosopher from the French colony of Martinique (today a French department).

His works have become influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory and Marxism. As well as being an intellectual, Fanon was a political radical, Pan-Africanist, and Marxist humanist concerned with the psychopathology of colonisation and the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonisation.

In the course of his work as a physician and psychiatrist, Fanon supported Algeria’s War of independence from France and was a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front.

Fanon has been described as “the most influential anticolonial thinker of his time.” For more than five decades, the life and works of Fanon have inspired national-liberation movements and other radical political organisations in Palestine, Sri Lanka, South Africa, and the United States. He formulated a model for community psychology, believing that many mental-health patients would do better if they were integrated into their family and community instead of being treated with institutionalized care. He also helped found the field of institutional psychotherapy while working at Saint-Alban under Francois Tosquelles and Jean Oury.

Fanon published numerous books, including The Wretched of the Earth (1961). This influential work focuses on what he believed is the necessary role of violence by activists in conducting decolonisation struggles.

Ian P. Howard

Ian Porteus Howard (20 July 1927 to 01 June 2013) was a Canadian psychologist and researcher in visual perception at York University in Toronto.

Ian Howard was born in Lancashire, England, close to the Yorkshire border. He studied for a BSc at Manchester University, graduating in 1952. Howard held academic positions in Departments of Psychology at Durham University (1953-1964) (from which he obtained his PhD in 1965), at New York University (1965), and at York University in Toronto (1966-2013). At York University, he contributed to the development of the Department of Psychology and, in 1992 founded the Centre for Vision Research (CVR).

Mark Rosenzweig

Mark Richard Rosenzweig (12 September 1922 to 20 July 2009) was an American research psychologist whose research on neuroplasticity in animals indicated that the adult brain remains capable of anatomical remodelling and reorganisation based on life experiences, overturning the conventional wisdom that the brain reached full maturity in childhood.

On This Day … 18 July [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1921 – Aaron Beck, American psychiatrist and academic (d. 2021).

People (Deaths)

  • 1990 – Karl Menninger, American psychiatrist and author (b. 1896).

Aaron Beck

Aaron Temkin Beck (18 July 1921 to 01 November 2021) was an American psychiatrist who was a professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania.

He is regarded as the father of cognitive therapy and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). His pioneering methods are widely used in the treatment of clinical depression and various anxiety disorders. Beck also developed self-report measures for depression and anxiety, notably the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), which became one of the most widely used instruments for measuring the severity of depression. In 1994 he and his daughter, psychologist Judith S. Beck, founded the non-profit Beck Institute for Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, which provides CBT treatment and training, as well as research. Beck served as President Emeritus of the organisation up until his death.

Beck was noted for his writings on psychotherapy, psychopathology, suicide, and psychometrics. He published more than 600 professional journal articles, and authored or co-authored 25 books. He was named one of the “Americans in history who shaped the face of American psychiatry”, and one of the “five most influential psychotherapists of all time” by The American Psychologist in July 1989. His work at the University of Pennsylvania inspired Martin Seligman to refine his own cognitive techniques and later work on learned helplessness.

Karl Menninger

Karl Augustus Menninger (22 July 1893 to 18 July 1990) was an American psychiatrist and a member of the Menninger family of psychiatrists who founded the Menninger Foundation and the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas.

Beginning with an internship in Kansas City, Menninger worked at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital and taught at Harvard Medical School. In 1919, he returned to Topeka where, together with his father, he founded the Menninger Clinic. By 1925, they had attracted enough investors, including brother William C. Menninger, to build the Menninger Sanitarium. His book, The Human Mind, which explained the science of psychiatry, was published in 1930.

The Menninger Foundation was established in 1941. After World War II, Karl Menninger was instrumental in founding the Winter Veterans Administration Hospital, in Topeka. It became the largest psychiatric training centre in the world. He was among the first members of the Society for General Systems Research.

In 1946 he founded the Menninger School of Psychiatry. It was renamed in his honour in 1985 as the Karl Menninger School of Psychiatry and Mental Health Science. In 1952, Karl Targownik, who would become one of his closest friends, joined the Clinic.