Alcohol and families
 Alcohol and families

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Alcohol and families

Constructed for Alcohol Awareness Week 2017 on the theme of ‘Alcohol and Families’, this collection embraces both major roles for the families of problem drinkers – as recipients of support and therapy to promote their own welfare, and as therapeutic agents engaged in promoting the drinker’s welfare through family therapy or less formal involvement in treatment. A collection starting with the analyses most recently added or updated, totalling today 82 documents.

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MATRIX CELL 2021 HTM file
Alcohol Treatment Matrix cell A5: Interventions; Safeguarding the community

Key studies on the impact of alcohol treatment on the community including families, children and crime. Explores the core contradiction between punishment and rehabilitation, asks whether this accounts for the poor record of criminal justice treatment, highlights the most robust test yet of brief alcohol counselling in probation, asks whether it can ever be safe to leave children with severely dependent drinkers, and recounts the alleged deception at the heart of a recommended treatment method.

MATRIX CELL 2021 HTM file
Alcohol Treatment Matrix cell B5: Practitioners; Safeguarding the community

Key studies on the impact of the treatment practitioner on safeguarding the community, families and children, and their influence in criminal justice contexts. Explores whether exceptional abilities are needed to forge productive therapeutic relationships in these situations, and invites you to ‘stress test’ a proposed universal rule: The trickier the situation, the more the worker matters.

MATRIX CELL 2021 HTM file
Drug Treatment Matrix cell B5: Practitioners; Safeguarding the community

Key studies on the contribution of the practitioner to reducing crime and safeguarding the community. Risks formulating a general rule: The trickier the situation, the more the worker matters – suggesting that therapeutic skills are even more important in formally coerced than other forms of treatment. Also asks whether those skills can most effectively be deployed when therapy is divorced from criminal justice supervision.

MATRIX CELL 2020 HTM file
Alcohol Treatment Matrix cell B4: Practitioners; Psychosocial therapies

Key studies on the impact of the practitioner in psychosocial therapies for alcohol dependence. Structured around Carl Rogers’ classic account of the prerequisites of effective psychotherapy.

MATRIX CELL 2020 HTM file
Alcohol Treatment Matrix cell A4: Interventions; Psychosocial therapies

Key studies on the ‘common factors’ underlying psychosocial therapies for problem drinking and the effectiveness of specific approaches. Explores the famous ‘Dodo bird’ hypothesis that all bona fide therapies are equivalent, examines the legacy of the UK’s most ambitious treatment trial, asks whether therapy can really make things worse, and questions how research amalgamating impacts from many patients can be applied to the treatment of an individual in their individual circumstances.

STUDY 2007 HTM file
Preventing alcohol-exposed pregnancies: a randomized controlled trial

Foetal exposure to alcohol is a leading cause of birth defects and developmental disabilities. Targeting interventions at women before they become pregnant – as with Project CHOICES – could shift the focus in clinical practice from treatment of substance-exposed pregnancies to prevention of a major (and costly) public health concern.

REVIEW 2019 HTM file
Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder: a systematic review of the cost of and savings from prevention in the United States and Canada

Study set in Canada and the United States finds more than enough financial justification for expanding prevention of foetal alcohol spectrum disorders. But what does ‘expansion’ mean – universal prevention, or focusing resources on those most at risk?

STUDY 1992 HTM file
Disulfiram treatment of alcoholism

Still relevant today, from the early 1990s a UK randomised trial of disulfiram in the treatment of alcohol dependence found that it significantly reduced drinking when there was daily supervision to make sure patients took the tablets, and they knew these would cause unpleasant physical effects if they drank.

REVIEW 2019 HTM file
Family-based prevention programmes for alcohol use in young people

Findings of this comprehensive review seem to almost entirely deflate what in the mid-2000s was a bubble of enthusiasm for parental programmes as a way to prevent or reduce drinking among teenagers – but despite this overall verdict, some interventions have had remarkable results.

STUDY 2019 HTM file
Efficacy and cost-effectiveness of an adjunctive personalised psychosocial intervention in treatment-resistant maintenance opioid agonist therapy: a pragmatic, open-label, randomised controlled trial

Instead of a set programme, a clinic in London tried offering methadone or buprenorphine patients still using heroin or cocaine a selection from a suite of well-supported psychological interventions tailored to the patient and then systematically re-tailored in the light of how they responded. It worked – but did it work well enough, and would the findings be replicated in more typical circumstances?


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