Experiences Administering Naloxone Among People in Different Social Roles: People Who Use Opioids and Family Members and Friends.

Unintentional drug overdose deaths continue to be a critical public health issue. Naloxone, a nonscheduled, safe, and effective drug that reverses opioid-involved overdoses is available to non-medically trained individuals ("lay people"), but there is scant information about how people in different social roles experience naloxone administration. We conducted 24 in-depth interviews with people who use opioids (PWUO; = 15) and family members and friends of people who use opioids (FF; = 9) who had administered naloxone in response to an opioid overdose.

The role of social connection in opioid use disorder treatment engagement.

Objective: Medications for opioid use disorder (OUD or MOUD) treatment combining pharmacotherapy with psychosocial support are effective for managing OUD. However, treatment engagement remains a challenge, with retention rates ∼30%-50%. Although social connection has been identified as important to recovery, it remains unclear whether and how social factors can bolster participation in treatment.

A mixed-methods analysis of risk-reduction strategies adopted by syringe services program participants and non-syringe services program participants in New York City.

Background: Since the emergence of fentanyl in the drug market, syringe services programs (SSPs) have been at the forefront of providing life-saving tools such as naloxone and fentanyl test strips to people who use drugs (PWUD). It is still unclear, however, how the adoption of risk-reduction practices has differed among PWUD in the context of increasing presence of non-pharmaceutical fentanyl in the drug supply. This study aims to assess the adoption of risk-reduction tools (e.

NYC RxStat: Stakeholder perspectives on a national model public health and public safety partnership to reduce overdose deaths.

NYC RxStat, the United States' first public health and public safety partnership aiming to reduce overdose deaths, began in 2012 and established a national model for cross-sector partnerships. The partnership aimed to integrate data-driven policing with actionable public health interventions and surveillance to develop and implement cross-sector overdose responses. With federal support, jurisdictions nationally have implemented public health and public safety partnerships modeled on RxStat.

The beginning of the end: A comparison of treatment completers and early dropouts in trainee-provided time-limited Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

About one in five clients drops out of treatment prematurely. Premature termination has been found to correlate with patient, therapist, and treatment factors, as well as complex interpersonal processes, including ruptures in the therapeutic alliance. This study examines the therapeutic alliance using a qualitative approach to patient-, therapist-, and observer-based data.

Research-Practice Partnership to Develop and Implement Routine Mental Health Symptom Tracking Tool Among Older Adults During COVID-19.

Objective: Older adults are disproportionally impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, causing a mental health crisis in late life, due to physical restrictions (e.g., quarantine), limited access to services, and lower literacy and access to technology.

Love in the Time of COVID-19: Experiences of a Psychology Trainee.

As the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) swept across the country, graduate students faced challenges they could have never anticipated. The future of coursework, research, graduation, and practica was unclear; for some, the circumstances were more dire as university closures resulted in a lack of housing, food, and internet access. While there is extant research of clinical trainee experience, significantly less has been written on their experiences of major events, let alone how it impacts our clinical work or theory-making.

Fentanyl preference among people who use opioids in New York City.

Background: Several studies have pointed to a sub-sample of people who use drugs (PWUD) who prefer the use of non-pharmaceutical fentanyl (NPF) and, as such, pose a unique challenge for public health initiatives amidst the continued rise in overdose mortality. However, matters of drug preference and autonomy of choice remain under-studied and often misunderstood. This paper examined the experiences of PWUD reporting a preference for NPF or an NPF-heroin mixture, specifically how they navigate the perceived benefits of NPF and its established risks.

"I didn't feel like a number": The impact of nurse care managers on the provision of buprenorphine treatment in primary care settings.

Background And Objective: To promote increased access to and retention in buprenorphine treatment for opioid use disorder, the New York City (NYC) Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) implemented the Buprenorphine Nurse Care Manager Initiative (BNCMI) in 2016, in which nurse care managers (NCMs) coordinate buprenorphine treatment in safety-net primary care clinics. To explore how patients experienced the care they received from NCMs, DOHMH staff conducted in-person, in-depth interviews with patients who had, or were currently receiving, buprenorphine treatment at BNCMI clinics. Participants were patients who were receiving, or had received, buprenorphine treatment through BNCMI at one of the participating safety-net primary care practices.

Deepening the Group Training Experience: Group Cohesion and Supervision Impact in Alliance-Focused Training.

Objective: The aim of the current study is to explore experiences of trainees engaged in alliance-focused training (AFT), a group supervision modality with an explicit focus on awareness of ruptures and implementation of repair strategies. Using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) group supervision as a point of comparison, the study examines supervisory alliance, ruptures, group cohesion and safety, and supervision impact.

Method: Eighty-three trainees (clinical psychology interns, advanced-level psychology externs and psychiatry residents) at a metropolitan medical center in New York City who received supervision in CBT (N = 38) or AFT (N = 45) reported on their group supervision experience.

Computational Markers of Risky Decision-making for Identification of Temporal Windows of Vulnerability to Opioid Use in a Real-world Clinical Setting.

Importance: Opioid addiction is a major public health problem. Despite availability of evidence-based treatments, relapse and dropout are common outcomes. Efforts aimed at identifying reuse risk and gaining more precise understanding of the mechanisms conferring reuse vulnerability are needed.

The Montclair Map Task: Balance, Efficacy, and Efficiency in Conversational Interaction.

This paper introduces a conversational speech corpus collected during the completion of a map-matching task that is available for research purposes via the Montclair State University Digital Commons Data Repository. The Montclair Map Task is a new, role-neutral conversational task that involves paired iconic maps with labeled landmarks and a path drawn from a start point, around various landmarks, to a finish mark. One advantage of this task-oriented corpus is the ability to derive independent objective measures of task performance for both members of a conversational pair that can be related to aspects of communicative style.

Phonetic convergence across multiple measures and model talkers.

This study consolidates findings on phonetic convergence in a large-scale examination of the impacts of talker sex, word frequency, and model talkers on multiple measures of convergence. A survey of nearly three dozen published reports revealed that most shadowing studies used very few model talkers and did not assess whether phonetic convergence varied across same- and mixed-sex pairings. Furthermore, some studies have reported effects of talker sex or word frequency on phonetic convergence, but others have failed to replicate these effects or have reported opposing patterns.