Category Archives: Research

Stop Calling It Behavioral Health!

Stop calling it behavioral health! Does the term cause stigma and discrimination?

By Robert Kent JD and Charles Morgan MD

Reprinted from thefix.com, originally published on 11/12/15

When somebody is treated for smoking cessation, the care will probably be provided within the behavioral health system. If that person is later diagnosed with lung cancer that will be treated over in physical health. If she becomes depressed, that’ll be managed back over in behavioral health. But if the depression causes digestive problems, that aspect of the patient’s health and health care will be treated…you get the picture. Many “behavioral” issues are driven by biological or hereditary conditions, and yet physical and behavioral health are frequently organized, paid for and managed in two entirely different systems. Two key figures at OASAS, which oversees one of the largest addiction treatment systems in the country, argue that the divide between physical and behavioral health, and the term itself, can lead to stigmatization and discrimination against people with “behavioral disorders.” Robert Kent, J.D., the general counsel at the NYS Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services (OASAS), leads OASAS’s work to implement health care and insurance reform for the Substance Use Disorders system in New York. Charles Morgan, MD, is the medical director of OASAS and a physician who has devoted over three decades to working with people and families affected by addiction. They both want you to “STOP CALLING IT BEHAVIORAL HEALTH!”… Richard Juman, PsyD.

We believe that it is time to stop calling substance use disorder and mental health “behavioral health.” We are unabashed advocates and supporters of the substance use disorder (SUD) treatment, prevention and recovery system. We are regularly amazed by the stories of people who are now able to live their lives in recovery because of the work done by the people in our system. We need to talk about these disorders in a language that reflects their true nature; they are medical conditions, the origins of which lie in the person’s brain, and the effects of which extend into every part of that person’s life, and as with other illnesses, virtually always into the lives of the people who are touched by the patient.

The term “behavioral health” is imprecise, since it doesn’t indicate whether one is talking about a mental health condition or a substance use disorder. More importantly, the concept of “behavioral health” as separate from the rest of health care has allowed insurance and managed care companies to create rules for managing services which have denied people access to needed services. If you follow the logic of using the term “behavioral health,” then people with type 2 diabetes, heart disease and asthma could very accurately be identified as having a “behavioral health” issue, as their chronic medical condition is aggravated by their behaviors. But we would never do that with those disorders.

Constellations of behavior manifest from many chronic medical conditions, some of which are construed as “medical” and others as “behavioral.” The bifurcation is as illogical as it is stigmatizing. People aren’t expected to be able to shrink their own tumors or cure their own infections, but they are expected to control their own behavior. Consequently, calling psychiatric and substance use conditions “behavioral” puts the onus on the patient, often to his tragic detriment in the form of discrimination in housing and employment or the realm of criminal prosecution.

An individual with a substance use disorder has a natural, predictable disease course, one that is responsive to treatment, allowing for recovery. While we obviously do not want these symptoms to continue, blaming a person for their “behavioral health” issues, rather than treating them, is as counterproductive as blaming a person with epilepsy for falling down when they have a seizure, or blaming the person who is allergic to bees for disrupting the annual family reunion picnic because s/he needs emergency care when s/he is stung. Since we do not want such problems to continue or to be ignored, being judgmental or pejorative about them is harmful because it impedes treatment. In the case of the person with a bee allergy, we would instead encourage him to carry an EpiPen, and we would work to remove any barriers that might prevent him from doing so. We would also remove the bees’ nest!

With regard to the methods and rules used by the insurers and managed care companies that operate in “behavioral health,” some of our recent initiatives provide ample proof of the impact of using the term. Thanks to the leadership of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, we now have a state law that requires insurance and managed care companies to have the decision-making criteria they use to manage substance use disorders reviewed and approved by OASAS. Our review of the criteria being used revealed that SUD level of care decisions were being significantly influenced by a person’s past failures or relapses, by whether they had “failed first” at a lower level of care before they sought a higher level of care, and by their “motivation” to seek help.

Some insurers, and even some providers of care, use the term “motivation” to exclude people from treatment. This is in contrast to the concept of motivation as described by the stages of change model, or in motivational interviewing technique, where a patient’s level of motivation is understood in order to allow for effective treatment. These types of rules would never be allowed for other chronic medical conditions like diabetes, heart disease, and asthma. Would we deny a diabetic their insulin because they ate chocolate cake the night before? Would we deny the person with heart disease medications because they ate chicken wings and french fries? Of course not, because we do not think of those other chronic medical conditions as behavioral in nature. Unfortunately, there is a bias towards thinking of SUDs as behavioral, and then allowing the punishment of the behaviors that are symptomatic of the condition.

Finally, and most importantly, we believe use of the term “behavioral health” plays a major role in the continued stigmatization of those with an SUD. Such terminology reflects a misunderstanding of SUD, and allows us to perpetuate the myth that the illness is volitional rather than based in biology. Critics of our stance tell us we are absolving people of responsibility for their actions, when in fact we are doing quite the opposite. By delineating the true nature of the illness, we can allow patients to get proper treatment for their illness. Blaming people for addiction would be like blaming people with irritable bowel syndrome for the symptoms of their disease. Acknowledging the disease of IBS allows for proper treatment, which then allows people to be more functional and self-actualized in a way that allows them to take responsibility for their recoveries and to get relief of debilitating symptoms. Similarly, when we treat SUD rationally in this way, rather than as a series of “volitional behaviors” that those afflicted should be able to stop if they were properly motivated, people affected by SUD can then take responsibility for their illness and get effective treatment.

With regard to the stigmatization of people with SUD, researchers estimate that only one in 10 people who have an SUD actually seek help. While we know there are many reasons people do not seek help, we know that the stigma associated with SUD has a significant inhibitory impact.

We should listen to the experts. The American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) defines addiction as follows:

Addiction is a primary, chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory and related circuitry. Dysfunction in these circuits leads to characteristic biological, psychological, social and spiritual manifestations. This is reflected in an individual pathologically pursuing reward and/or relief by substance use and other behaviors.

Addiction is characterized by inability to consistently abstain, impairment in behavioral control, craving, diminished recognition of significant problems with one’s behaviors and interpersonal relationships, and a dysfunctional emotional response. Like other chronic diseases, addiction often involves cycles of relapse and remission. Without treatment or engagement in recovery activities, addiction is progressive and can result in disability or premature death.

Michael Botticelli, the director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, has talked recently about the language we use impacting whether people seek help for an SUD and he has encouraged us to use different language. We know that some will disagree with our viewpoint and some will dispute the basis used for making it. We also know that we can only change what we do, and we can hope others will do the same.

It is essential that we start thinking of substance use disorders and describing them by using the same language that we use when we describe other chronic medical conditions. The language is critical here: Let’s change the world by changing the way we think about, and talk about, the medical conditions formerly known as “behavioral health.”

This article written by Robert Kent and Dr. Charles Morgan was reprinted with permission from the 11/12/2015 issue of theFix.com https://www.thefix.com/stop-calling-it-behavioral-health

Robert A. Kent serves as the General Counsel for the New York State Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services. In this role, Mr. Kent provides overall legal support, policy guidance and direction to OASAS Commissioner Arlene González-Sánchez, the Executive Office and all divisions of the agency. Robert is leading the OASAS efforts to implement Governor Cuomo’s Combat Heroin and Medicaid Redesign Team initiatives.

Charles W. Morgan, MD, FASAM, FAAFP, DABAM is the Medical Director of OASAS. He has worked in the field of Addiction Medicine for over three decades and is a Fellow of both the American Society of Addiction Medicine and the American Academy of Family Medicine. Dr. Morgan has expertise in all modalities of patient and family healthcare.

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Service keeps you sober — Research is proving this age-old slogan

Melissa Killeen

Melissa Killeen

Ever since I walked into the rooms, I heard the phrase “Service keeps you sober.” I already knew I was a helping type of person, in fact in my addiction it was called being a rescuer. So I stayed away from service for the first few years. When I was ready to do service, I remember desperately waiting the required three months of sobriety to chair my first meeting. Then praying to receive special dispensation to be a meeting list coordinator at the Intergroup/Regional level, because I only had six months, not the required one year of sobriety. I learned why service kept me sober. It occupies the time I would be spending acting out with doing good things. Well, that’s what I thought.

Service might be the key to staying sober

Maria Pagano, an addiction researcher at Case Western University, thinks service to others might be the key to staying sober. In recent years, a growing body of research has found that helping others brings measurable physical and psychological benefits to the helper. Building on this work, Pagano is exploring the surprising benefits of altruism for people battling addiction. Her studies have shown that addicts who help others, even in small ways—such as calling other AA members to remind them about meetings or setting up chairs before a meeting—can significantly improve their chances of staying sober and avoiding relapse.

Surveys and studies say that abuse of alcohol and narcotics is rising among young people  and drug-related deaths have doubled among middle-class whites. Many addicts who exit treatment programs relapse within the first 90 days of being discharged, leaving treatment professionals yearning for more effective treatment strategies. If getting addicts to do service is key to their recovery, as Pagano believes, it could revolutionize the addictions treatment field.

Pagano was familiar with the research on helping when she joined Brown University’s Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies Center in 2002. As she learned more about the different treatments for addiction, she was surprised that there seemed to be no one looking at the role of doing service.

“It was all about what services to give these suffering patients,” she says, “and nothing about getting them active or about how their own experiences about getting sober and being sober can be useful to others.”

Addicts help their recovery by helping other people

She decided to explore the impact that helping others could have on people in recovery. Looking at data from one of the largest studies of addiction to date, with 1,726 participants, conducted by the University of Connecticut, Pagano was able to measure it by looking at how many study participants became AA sponsors or completed the 12th step of AA, which involves helping others in recovery.

When she compared helpers to non-helpers in AA, she found that 40 percent of the addicts that did service or the “helpers” avoided taking a drink in the 12 months following their stay at treatment facility, while only 22 percent of “non-helpers” stayed sober. These results have rarely been seen in addiction treatment studies before.

In fact, age, gender, income, work status, addiction severity level, or level of antisocial personality disorder of the participants in the study didn’t matter. None of these characteristics predicted helping behavior. “Someone from Yale to jail had an equal chance of being a helper,” Pagano says.

Only one factor seemed related to helping; those who were more depressed starting out in their recovery were more likely to help. This seemed counter-intuitive, given that depressed people often suffer from lethargy and a sense of helplessness. But according to Pagano, this is exactly the kind of thinking about depression that gets recovery therapists in trouble.

“In the treatment field, we have this notion that says, ‘Oh, don’t ask too much of the client, especially if they’re depressed. They just need to rest,’” she says. But when she studied the effect of helping on clinical depression, she found that, after six months of doing service, people who had been depressed had their depression levels drop significantly—below the level of what’s clinically considered “depressed.”

Pagano and her colleagues devised a more precise measure of helping behavior called the SOS (Service to Others in Sobriety) scale for use in future studies. This scale lists 12 helping behaviors that are built into AA and Narcotics Anonymous (NA) meetings—like picking up the phone and calling a fellow AA or NA member, contacting someone to encourage meeting attendance, setting up chairs before the meetings, or becoming a sponsor.

Maria Pagano’s research suggests addicts help their recovery by helping other people. “This is a no-brainer,” she says. “It’s as essential as medication-assisted therapy.”

You can’t be ruminating or feeling bitter if you’re feeling moved by helping someone else.

With a grant from the John Templeton Foundation and funding from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, Pagano used the SOS scale to look at 200 adolescents undergoing treatment for alcoholism or drug addiction in Northern Ohio. Her results showed that kids with higher helping scores on the SOS had significantly lower cravings for alcohol and narcotics, reduced feelings of entitlement, and higher “global functioning”—a measure used by clinicians to reflect participation in groups, getting along with others, and academic performance, among other behaviors.

In fact, Pagano found that even risk factors like having alcoholic or drug-addicted parents, learning problems, physical disabilities, or additional psychiatric diagnoses didn’t change the effect of helping others; helping still had a positive impact.

Pagano’s analysis makes a significant contribution to the research that shows adolescents benefit from helping others. Pagano’s research is unique and cutting edge, because no one has really studied helping in the context of recovering from addictions.

AA folks recognized the benefits of service in AA, but there was no research to back it up. Maria Pagano is bringing good science to this age old-slogan “Service keeps you sober”.


Resources used in this blog

Learn more about Maria Pagano’s work on her website, Helping Others Live Sober.

Pagano, M. E., Kelly, J. F., Scur, M. D., Ionescu, R. A., Stout, R. L., Post, S. G. (2013). Assessing Youth Participation in AA-Related Helping: Validity of the Service to Others in Sobriety (SOS) Questionnaire in an Adolescent Sample. American Journal on Addictions 22(1), 60-66.

Pagano, M.E., Post, S.G., & Johnson, S.M. (2011). Alcoholics Anonymous-Related Helping and the Helper Therapy Principle. Alcoholism Treatment Quarterly 29(1), 23-34.

Pagano, M.E., Krentzman, A.R., Onder, C.C., Baryak, J.L., Murphy, J.L., Zywiak, W.H., & Stout, R.L. (2010). Service to Others in Sobriety (SOS). Alcoholism Treatment Quarterly 28(2), 111-127. PMC3050518.

Pagano, M.E., Zemore, S.E., Onder, C.C., & Stout, R.L. (2009). Predictors of initial AA-related helping: Findings from Project MATCH. Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs 70(1), 117-125. PMC2629624.

 

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Addiction is a Symptom of Untreated Trauma

melissa-new-post“What is addiction, really? It is a sign, a signal, a symptom of distress. It is a language that tells us about a plight that must be understood.” — Alice Miller, author of Breaking down the Wall of Silence

I am a recovery coach. A recovery coach or sober companion is often called in to work with the most difficult addict, the chronic relapser. A chronic relapser is an individual that has been to several rehabs, often 7, 8 or 9 visits in less than five years. Who has not been able to put together 90 sober days, except in treatment. Whose family, spouse or children have given up on them. In reality, a chronic relapser is an addict that is acting out in their addiction. Their addiction is just a symptom of untreated trauma.

Often, calling a recovery coach is the last resort.

My first job, of course, is to make sure this person doesn’t drink, use or act out. And to find some redeeming qualities of this addicted person so I can approach healing the behaviors driving the addiction. This is the key point that brought me to the understanding that many of my clients have experienced some form of trauma, early in their childhood or adolescent lives.

I always ask the client for their story. I provide all of my clients the ACE study questions. ACE means Adverse Childhood Experiences. The ACE study is an ongoing collaboration between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permanente’s Health Appraisal Clinic in San Diego. It started in 1976 with the purpose of finding more about childhood trauma, and the later-life health and well-being of participants. (For more information on ACE, see my blog post dated August 20, 2015). The ACE study poses such questions as: Did you move a lot? Did you ever go hungry? Did you experience a childhood that was less than nurturing? Did you ever have a moment that overwhelmed you? Did you live through an ordeal that changed how you think about people, places or things? The results of the ACE questions, and the addict’s story that comes after it, always profoundly moves me. I get a much more honest story than most clinicians, mainly because of these questions.

The reason it’s significant for me to identify and acknowledge trauma, is because research proves that trauma can activate behaviors that lead to addiction. My clients are using a drug or alcohol as a way of self-protection, of calming down, as life preservation. Everyone in the rooms (AA, NA meetings) knows addicts “use” in order to “numb out.” Well, let’s rethink that, turning it a bit to say: victims of trauma are really using a drug or drink to:

  • Stay safe: After trauma the addict’s own mind can feel like a danger zone, which makes being “out of it” feel safer than being in it.
  • Escape memories: Unwanted and unresolved memories have a way of popping up incessantly after trauma; addictions offer the mind a different area of, or reduced capacity for focus that helps suppress reminiscing.
  • Soothe pain: Substances or the adrenalin rush of self-destructive behaviors change the addict’s body chemistry, releasing endorphins and other mood enhancers that reduce discomfort.
  • Be in control: Sometimes, engaging in addictive behaviors can lead an addict to feel strong, resilient and courageous, an experience that is tremendously alluring when trauma from the past intrudes on the present.
  • Create a world the addict can tolerate: The intense feelings brought on by fear, memories and anxiety can make any moment seem overwhelming. The release of tension brought on by addiction-oriented behavior helps facilitate a manageable experience.
  • Treat yourself the way you feel you deserve: Trauma can leave an addict feeling less-than, worthless, hopeless, and damaged. The more self-destructive the addict behaves, the more it can feel like he or she is living in alignment with who they truly are. While this is false, it can help reduce feelings of otherness and disconnection.
  • Redefine who the addict really is: Trauma changes an addict’s identity all the way down to the core of their beliefs and self-definition. It can seem as if no one understands them. Engaging in addictions can help create a sense of community by connecting the addict to others who feel, see, think and behave as they do. Addictions can help the addict revise their self-perception by allowing them to engage in and act out behaviors that allow them to feel stronger, more courageous, capable, etc., than trauma has left them feeling.[1]

This puts the addiction-trauma link into perfect perspective for me, and I hope it opens some eyes for other addicts, alcoholics, and clinicians that are reading this post. Next week’s post will go on to explain the scientific research that backs up this discovery that addiction is just a symptom of untreated trauma.


Research used in this blog:

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/acestudy/about.html

Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, Posted on August 20, 2015 by Melissa Killeen, https://www.mkrecoverycoaching.com

[1] Trauma and Addiction: 7 Reasons Your Habit Makes Perfect Sense, by Michele Rosenthal. Published on March 30, 2015 in Behavioral Health, Living in Recovery, Living with Addiction and at http://www.recovery.org

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