Thoughts?

Recognition and resources for comprehensive mental health and drug and alcohol services

Following the disturbing episode of Four Corners last night titled Hidden voices, the Network of Alcohol and Other Drugs Agencies (NADA) is calling for a renewed focus on the state of the mental health and drug and alcohol service systems and the current approaches that perpetuate a focus on hospital beds and acute, crisis-driven services.

Hidden voices highlighted the lack of access to acute mental health care services and the dearth of sub-acute mental health services, supported accommodation and drug and alcohol rehabilitation services in regional areas of Australia. It is the experience of NADA and its membership that the situation in Mackay is replicated in regional areas of NSW. Mr Larry Pierce, Chief Executive Officer of NADA says, “the lack of resources and recognition for the work of community based services in providing sub-acute care and ongoing rehabilitation creates a vicious cycle that exacerbates the strain placed on hospital-based acute care services that already cannot meet the community demand.”

Most importantly, the episode highlighted the incredible strain that the lack of services places on individuals with mental illness and drug and alcohol issues and their families. “These tragic stories represent just how intractable and wicked these problems are but I fully agree with Professors McGorry and Mendoza that we do know the models of care and interventions that work. Adequate resources need to be directed towards these models of care to prevent this from being an ongoing national tragedy,” says Mr Pierce. These models support community based approaches and critically, they intervene early before mental illness and drug and alcohol issues become constant and defining features of a person’s adult life.

Reiterating the comments of Adjunct Professor John Mendoza, NADA strongly calls on the NSW and Federal governments to invest in a comprehensive mental health and drug and alcohol service system that provides for packages of care for consumers predominantly provided in the community rather than the funding of an inadequate number of hospital beds and an insufficient scattering of community based services in NSW and across Australia.

Would anyone like to predict what the conservative lobby’s reaction will be to the report?

The effect of marijuana scenes in anti-marijuana public service announcements on adolescents’ evaluation of ad effectiveness is the study and it’s worth reading the whole thing.

The take home message:

The analysts concluded that their most consistent findings related to the presence of scenes showing cannabis or its use. Youngsters unlikely in any event to use the drug reacted well to anti-cannabis ads regardless, but those the ads most needed to deter – the ones most likely to use the drug – saw the ads overall as less effective, and especially those which featured the drug or its use. Neither were they swayed by what young people in general saw as stronger anti-cannabis arguments; on one important measure, they actually reacted more negatively to strong-argument ads. The lesser relevance of argument strength may have been due to the fact that in respect of cannabis deterrence, youngsters saw all the arguments as only moderately convincing. These findings caution against featuring images of cannabis or its use in anti-drug campaigns.

Are you surprised by any of that? I’m not particularly…

The Real Cost of Homeopathy

There is no evidence that homeopathy is more effective than a placebo yet medical insurance companies – subsidised by the government – are extending their cover due to client demand, while health authorities lack the power to act on misleading claims that can have lethal consequences.

Dr Ken Harvey of La Trobe University’s School of Public Health says health insurance premiums are being driven “higher than they need to be because the insurers involved fund alternative therapies that lack an evidence base, such as homeopathy, reflexology and iridology”.

Writing in the June edition of Australasian Science, published today, Dr Harvey says the practice is occurring at a time “when premiums are consistently rising faster than the consumer price index. As a result many people, especially those retired on fixed incomes, have great difficulty maintaining their private health insurance cover.

“As the government substantially subsidises private health insurance, this means that all taxpayers are contributing to therapies that lack evidence of their effectiveness.

Dr Harvey explains that homeopathic preparations contain little or no active ingredient. While this means “they are unlikely to directly cause harm,” he warns that “the results can be deadly… Earlier this year, a homeopath and his wife were found guilty of manslaughter after their baby daughter died when they treated her severe eczema with homeopathic remedies rather than conventional medicines.“

Dr Harvey says that “the World Health Organisation does not recommend homeopathy for the treatment of serious diseases”, while the UK’s House of Commons Science and Technology Committee “recently concluded that the UK health service should cease funding homeopathy because ‘homeopathic products perform no better than placebos’.”

In Australia, claims made for homeopathic medicines are subject to the Therapeutic Goods Advertising Code, but Dr Harvey says that “the Complaints Resolution Panel that administers the Code has no power to enforce its determinations. The end result is that around one-third of those found to breach the rules fail to publish retractions or withdraw misleading material.”

Dr Harvey describes a case where “an Australian homeopath claimed that homeopathic immunisation was effective against polio, meningococcal disease, cholera, whooping cough and other serious diseases… These claims breached numerous sections of the Therapeutic Goods Advertising Code, including promotion of a treatment for which there was no evidence of efficacy. The homeopath was asked to publish a retraction and withdraw misleading information but she refused.”

Dr Harvey concludes: “The Rudd government needs to stand up to the alt-med lobby and give the TGA real teeth”.

Nominations for the 2010 Australian Crime & Violence Prevention Awards, recognizing programs to reduce crime and violence in Australia, are now open. Last year 30 projects from around Australia received awards of up to $15,000 in support of their efforts. Programs of all sizes that help to reduce crime and violence against children, women, men, Indigenous people or ethnic communities, are encouraged to nominate.

National winners will be flown to Canberra for the awards presentation at Parliament House

http://www.aic.gov.au/en/crime_community/acvpa/2010.aspx

It is with great pleasure that I can inform you that the Law Enforcement And Harm Reduction Network (LEAHRN) website is now live.

The website can be accessed through: www.leahrn.org/

LEAHRN is about bringing law enforcement and harm reduction closer together.

LEAHRN aims to connect people who want to know more about how police and harm reduction services can work together more effectively.

LEAHRN seeks to promote harmony and a better understanding between police and health service providers so that more programs involving clean needles and syringes, methadone, condoms and supervised injecting facilities can be successfully delivered.

The website is still in its formative stages and will undergo further development over the next few weeks, including additional resources and updated information being added regularly.

You can access the LEAHRN Blog – ‘COPS HR’ to write an opinion, make a comment, post news items, ask questions etc etc about issues related to policing and harm reduction. I encourage you to forward the LEAHRN link to others, particularly police, to facilitate connections/discussions between those representing law enforcement and harm reduction agencies.