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CHOICES and Learning About Healthy Living
Consumers Helping Others Improve their Condition by Ending Smoking
CHOICES was founded in 2005 by Dr. Williams and Marie Verna through a partnership with the Mental Health Association of NJ and the Legacy Foundation, along with ongoing support from the NJ Division of Mental Health and Addiction Services. CHOICES is a consumer driven initative to outreach smokers with mental illness in the community.
To learn more, please visit their website at:
http://www.njchoices.org |
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LEARNING ABOUT HEALTHY LIVING (LAHL)
Although tobacco use and dependence is very common among people with serious mental illness (SMI) and a leading cause of morbidity and mortality, treatment options are limited, especially for lower motivated smokers who may not be ready for a “quit smoking” treatment.
In collaboration with the NJ Division of Mental Health Services, three partners at Rutgers developed a specialized group treatment intervention for this population entitled Learning about Healthy Living (LAHL). Click here to download the PDF file. Co-authors and contributors included members of the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School Division of Addiction Psychiatry, University Behavioral Health Care (UBHC), and the School of Public Health-Tobacco Dependence Program. LAHL is a 20 session group treatment approach that is designed for all types of smokers with different mental health problems. The goal of the intervention is to increase individual’s awareness about the risks of tobacco use, treatment options, enhance motivation to address tobacco, and to begin by making other healthy life choices.
LAHL has been in use in mental health treatment programs in New Jersey since 2004. The LAHL treatment approach supports the current focus on wellness and recovery within the mental health field and is being used in mental health sites with great success.
The LAHL manual is now available as a publicly available resource. It is hoped that the dissemination of this valued resource will help more smokers with mental illness across the country.
We request that you please give us feedback about your experiences with the manual. (Feedback can be sent to Dr Jill Williams at williajm@rwjms.rutgers.edu) If you plan to publish about this experience using the LAHL materials we would ask that you cite the source and contributing authors.
We hope that you will find the materials helpful in your clinical work helping smokers with serious mental illness.
Williams JM, Ziedonis DM, Speelman N, Vreeland B, Zechner M, Rahim R, O’Hea E. Learning about Healthy Living: Tobacco and You Manual. Revised 2012. Supported by a grant from the NJ Division of Mental Health Services.
Williams JM, Ziedonis DM, Vreeland B, Speelman-Edwards N, Zechner MR, Williams MT, Rahim R, Karimi L, Molnar M, Eilers R. A wellness approach to addressing tobacco in mental health settings: Learning about Healthy Living. Am J Psychiatr Rehabil, 12:352-369, 2009.
Lee JG, Ranney LM, Goldstein AO, McCullough A, Fulton-Smith SM, Collins NO.Successful implementation of a wellness and tobacco cessation curriculum in psychosocial rehabilitation clubhouses. BMC Public Health. 2011 Sep 14;11:702.
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Faculty and staff from the Division of Addiction Psychiatry were in Washington, DC, this week to present at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's meeting of the Interagency Committee on Smoking and Health, which comprises 21 members from eight federal agencies, including the United States Surgeon General, who chairs the committee, and five public members. Jill M. Williams, MD, professor and chief of addiction psychiatry, along with Deidre Stenard, a peer counselor with NJ CHOICES, a program of the division, presented during an afternoon session, "Notes From the Fields: Promising Practices." Patricia Dooley Budsock, MA, LPC, CTTS, mental health clinician, also was in attendance.
The meeting was focused on “Behavioral Health and Tobacco Control,” with the goal of identifying federal actions to address disparities in tobacco use among behavioral health populations.
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Contact Us
Trish Dooley Budsock, MA, LPC
Phone: (732) 235-3361
dooleypc@rwjms.rutgers.edu