Implementation of a Recovery-Oriented Training Program for Psychiatric Nurses in the Inpatient Setting: A Mixed-Methods Hospital Quality Improvement Study.

This mixed-methods hospital quality improvement (QI) study primarily aimed to reduce the use of mechanical restraints in a short-stay inpatient psychiatric setting by facilitating change in care delivery through recovery-oriented nursing practice. The implementation of an evidence-based education for psychiatric-mental health registered nurses (PMH-RNs) intended to improve their knowledge of, and attitudes toward, recovery-focused mental health treatment principles. Findings suggest that recovery-oriented training programs for PMH-RNs can be a potentially useful hospital strategy for restraint reduction. In this article, the authors report their findings using the SQUIRE 2.0 framework for publication of QI studies (Ogrinc et al., 2015).

Telemental Health: Digital Disruption and the Opportunity to Expand Care.

Telemental health, which involves clinicians connecting remotely to patients via teleconferencing, has seen growing interest. In addition to providing in-home treatment, this technology allows specialists to provide care in remote and underserved areas. Current research suggests that both patients and clinicians are satisfied with telemental health services and that it is comparable in terms of quality to in-person care. Nonetheless, concerns still exist regarding its effects on the role of clinicians and the care they provide.

Short message service can be a promising tool for psychiatric patients and clinicians.

Short message service (SMS), commonly referred to as text messaging, allows instantaneous communication between mobile telephones and other systems via 160-character messages. SMS has a wide reach, and thus researchers and public health officials have considered using this platform for health-related communication. Today, as our society continues to integrate components of automation in various forms and levels of human interaction, and with the increasing ubiquity of mobile technology in health care, technology-delivered health interventions such as SMS offer a creative alternative that can be a valuable tool to assist mental health patients in their own treatment and recovery and for the mental health clinicians who are responsible for providing care and its delivery.

The development of a brief acceptance and mindfulness-based program aimed at reducing sexual revictimization among college women with a history of childhood sexual abuse.

Women with a history of childhood sexual assault (CSA) are more likely to be revictimized; however, most existing programs aimed at reducing sexual victimization do not expressly address the issue of revictimization. The present study examined the efficacy of a brief mindfulness-based program in reducing rates of sexual assault and revictimization in college women over the course of an academic semester. Although the results were not statistically significant, a large-magnitude effect was noted, whereby women with a history of CSA who participated in the program were less likely to be sexually assaulted and raped at 2-month follow-up.

Family roles in homes with alcohol-dependent parents: an evidence-based review.

The behavioral health care field has seen attempts to understand the functioning of families in which a parent is dependent on alcohol as a set of roles into which the other family members fall. The most popular of these classifications taught in the United States includes five roles (enabler, hero, lost child, mascot, and scapegoat) that are used to conceptualize families and individuals in treatment and support group settings, as well as in popular self-help literature. Attempts to operationalize and measure these roles have, however, been fraught with difficulties. The resulting research base has seen conflicting evidence for the support of such roles, as well as little work on diverse families. The evidence against such well-defined family roles, the questions surrounding their development, and the difficulties of applying such constructs in real-life situations (with numerous confounding factors and unknown associated conditions) may indicate that their clinical utility does not win out over the problems inherent with this manner of classification.

Psychophysiological and self-reported emotional responding in alcohol-dependent college students: the impact of brief acceptance/mindfulness instruction.

Drinking motivated by the desire to cope with painful emotions has been shown to be strongly related to alcohol dependence; the resulting maladaptive pattern of substance use can, therefore, be conceptualized as a form of experiential avoidance (an attempt to decrease contact with unpleasant internal states). Acceptance-based interventions, which specifically address experiential avoidance, are multifaceted, and the mechanisms of action are only beginning to be understood. Using a treatment analogue design to look at the underlying components of acceptance-based interventions, the authors tested the effects of brief mindfulness instructions on the emotional responding of alcohol-dependent college students and compared these results with those from a sample of nondependent students. Multidimensional self-reported and psychophysiological emotional responses to pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral pictorial stimuli did not differ between alcohol-dependent and nondependent participants or between the alcohol-dependent participants receiving the mindfulness versus neutral condition. Alcohol-dependent participants' severity of alcohol dependence was found to be related to both self-reported and psychophysiological responses to the unpleasant pictures; these results support the notion that alcohol-dependent participants may use alcohol to cope with unpleasant emotions.