Drug Alcohol Depend
January 2025
Background: Cannabis Use Disorder (CUD) is an increasingly prevalent disorder affecting millions of Americans each year. Psychedelic compounds have recently been investigated for their therapeutic potential in treating substance use disorders, yet no prior work has examined the relationship between naturalistic use of specific psychedelic compounds and rates of disordered cannabis use.
Methods: Using a nationally representative sample of U.
Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) presents a significant personal and societal burden and is associated with chronic medical comorbidities and markedly lower quality of life. Effective treatments exist, less than half of individuals with lifetime GAD will ever seek psychotherapeutic or pharmacological treatment. A thorough understanding of the factors that influence treatment seeking for GAD is warranted.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProblematic anger is linked with multiple adverse smoking outcomes, including cigarette dependence, heavy smoking, and cessation failure. A smoking cessation intervention that directly targets anger and its maintenance factors may increase rates of smoking cessation. We examined the efficacy of an interpretation bias modification for hostility (IBM-H) to facilitate smoking cessation in smokers with elevated trait anger.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNeuropsychiatric disorders pose a high societal cost, but their treatment is hindered by lack of objective outcomes and fidelity metrics. AI technologies and specifically Natural Language Processing (NLP) have emerged as tools to study mental health interventions (MHI) at the level of their constituent conversations. However, NLP's potential to address clinical and research challenges remains unclear.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAims: To measure the effect of cognitive-behavioral techniques (CBTs) on gambling disorder severity and gambling behavior at post-treatment and follow-up.
Method: Seven databases and two clinical trial registries were searched to identify peer-reviewed studies and unpublished studies of randomized controlled trials. The Cochrane Risk of Bias tool assessed risk of bias in the included studies.
Cannabis use disorder (CUD) and frequency of use are highly related to social anxiety disorder (SAD). With updates to diagnostic criteria of psychiatric disorders and recent changes in cannabis laws, the present study sought to explore the relationships between cannabis use, CUD, and social anxiety in a large nationally representative sample of individuals with lifetime (N = 1255) and past-year SAD (N = 980). Notably, we found that at the symptom level, at least weekly cannabis use was significantly related to fear or avoidance of social situations interfering with relationships in both samples.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Digital mental health interventions, such as 2-way and asynchronous messaging therapy, are a growing part of the mental health care treatment ecosystem, yet little is known about how users engage with these interventions over the course of their treatment journeys. User engagement, or client behaviors and therapeutic relationships that facilitate positive treatment outcomes, is a necessary condition for the effectiveness of any digital treatment. Developing a better understanding of the factors that impact user engagement can impact the overall effectiveness of digital psychotherapy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Individuals who experience gambling harms report that sustained recovery involves changing both gambling behaviors and psychological symptoms, as well as building a meaningful life. However, there is limited understanding about the effect of cognitive behavioral (CB) techniques on psychological symptoms and quality of life. The purpose of the present study was to examine the effect of CB techniques for gambling-related harms on broader recovery outcomes such as psychological symptoms and quality of life.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNumerous studies have found that long term retention is very low in remote clinical studies (>4 weeks) and to date there is limited information on the best methods to ensure retention. The ability to retain participants in the completion of key assessments periods is critical to all clinical research, and to date little is known as to what methods are best to encourage participant retention. To study incentive-based retention methods we randomized 215 US adults (18+ years) who agreed to participate in a sequential, multiple assignment randomized trial to either high monetary incentive (HMI, $125 USD) and combined low monetary incentive ($75 USD) plus alternative incentive (LMAI).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: While message-based therapy has been shown to be effective in treating a range of mood disorders, it is critical to ensure that providers are meeting a consistently high standard of care over this medium. One recently developed measure of messaging quality-The Facilitative Interpersonal Skills Task for Text (FIS-T)-provides estimates of therapists' demonstrated ability to convey psychotherapy's common factors (e.g.
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