Nancy Roget

The Impact of Acceptance and Commitment Training and Multicultural Training on the Stigmatizing Attitudes and Professional Burnout of Substance Abuse Counselors.

Empirically validated methods for reducing stigma and prejudice toward recipients of behavioral health-care services are badly needed. In the present study, two packages presented in 1-day workshops were compared to a biologically oriented educational control condition in the alleviation of stigmatizing attitudes in drug abuse counselors. One, Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT), utilized acceptance, defusion, mindfulness, and values methods. The other, multicultural training, sensitized participants to group prejudices and biases. Measures of stigma and burnout were taken pretraining, posttraining, and after a 3-month follow-up. Results showed that multicultural training had an impact on stigmatizing attitudes and burnout post-intervention but not at follow-up, but showed better gains in a sense of personal accomplishment as compared to the educational control at follow-up. ACT had a positive impact on stigma at follow-up and on burnout at posttreatment and follow-up and follow-up gains in burnout exceeded those of multicultural training. ACT also significantly changed the believability of stigmatizing attitudes. This process mediated the impact of ACT but not multicultural training on follow-up stigma and burnout. This preliminary study opens new avenues for reducing stigma and burnout in behavioral health counselors.

Burnout among the addiction counseling workforce: The differential roles of mindfulness and values-based processes and work-site factors

Although work-site factors have been shown to be a consistent predictor of burnout, the importance of mindfulness and values-based processes among addiction counselors has been little examined. In this study, we explored how strongly experiential avoidance, cognitive fusion, and values commitment related to burnout after controlling for well-established work-site factors (job control, coworker support, supervisor support, salary, workload, and tenure). We conducted a cross-sectional survey among 699 addiction counselors working for urban substance abuse treatment providers in six states of the United States. Results corroborated the importance of work-site factors for burnout reduction in this specific population, but we found that mindfulness and values-based processes had a stronger and more consistent relationship with burnout as compared with work-site factors. We conclude that interventions that target experiential avoidance, cognitive fusion, and values commitment may provide a possible new direction for the reduction of burnout among addiction counselors.

Attitudes about addiction: a national study of addiction educators.

The following study, funded by the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA), utilized the Addiction Belief Inventory (ABI; Luke, Ribisl, Walton, & Davidson, 2002) to examine addiction attitudes in a national sample of U.S. college/university faculty teaching addiction-specific courses (n = 215). Results suggest that addiction educators view substance abuse as a coping mechanism rather than a moral failure, and are ambivalent about calling substance abuse or addiction a disease. Most do not support individual efficacy toward recovery, the ability to control use, or social use after treatment. Modifiers of addiction educator attitudes include level of college education; teaching experience; licensure/certification, and whether the educator is an addiction researcher. Study implications, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.

The impact of billing/reimbursement structures on the integration of aSBI into primary care practice: implementation experiences at five different types of clinics

Background The purpose of the Screen-All Project was to promote adoption of alcohol SBI (aSBI) in five primary care clinics within the University of Nevada School of Medicine Health System (System). Prior to this project, no formal aSBI activities were being conducted in these clinics or within the System. The five clinics included in the project provide healthcare services to adult men and women, including those at risk for alcohol-exposed pregnancies (e.g. women of reproductive age; college students). Two of the five clinics have non-Medicaid/Medicare/insurance funding sources for providing services, whereas three of the five clinics have Medicaid/Medicare/insurance funding sources. The objective is to determine how billing/reimbursement impacts implementation of aSBI.