CABHR Newsletters
Newsletter Highlights
CABHR to Host College Drinking Forum
Alcohol consumption among college students is a serious public health concern, one that is particularly pressing in Wisconsin. Surveys at University of Wisconsin campuses reveal that more UW students drink alcohol compared with national averages, and those who drink consume more per occasion than national averages.
Motivated by such indicators, CABHR is leading an effort to create a consortium of Milwaukee-area universities, colleges, and community organizations to develop strategies to reduce problem drinking among young adults here.
Consortium members will work to implement evidence-based prevention strategies across multiple campuses in the Milwaukee area. The planning group will also carry out a systematic process and outcome evaluation. Over the next few months, the planning group will identify and recruit potential consortium partners and will discuss possible directions for prevention program design.
To further stimulate collaboration, CABHR will host a workshop on college drinking on May 18, 2009 at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The morning program, open to the community, will include a panel presentation by leading experts on college drinking prevention strategies, including William DeJong, Ph.D., of the Boston University School of Public Health, and Bob Saltz, Ph.D., of the Prevention Research Center in Berkeley, California. That afternoon, consortium members will meet with the experts to discuss implementing prevention strategies. The workshop is funded in part by a grant from MillerCoors.
The following articles are referenced in the Spring 2009 issue of CABHR News:
Greenfield, S. F., Brooks, A. J., Gordon, S. M., Green, C.A., Kropp, F., McHugh, R. K., et al. (2007). Substance abuse treatment entry, retention, and outcome in women: A review of the literature. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 86, 1–21.
Greenfield SF, Trucco EM, McHugh RK, Lincoln M, Gallop RJ (2007). The women’s recovery group study: A stage I trial of women-focused group therapy for substance use disorders versus mixed-gender group drug counseling. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 90, 39-47.
Fendrich, M., Hubbell, Amy, Lurigio, A. J. (2006) Provider’s perceptions of gender-specific drug treatment. Journal of Drug Issues, 36(3), 667-686.
Experts on Women and Substance abuse
Thank you to the researchers who shared their expertise for the Spring 2009 issue on
Women and Addiction. They include:
Carol Boyd, Ph.D.
Director, Institute for Research on Women and Gender,
Deborah J. Oakley Collegiate Professor of Nursing,
Research Professor, University of Michigan Substance Abuse Research Center,
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Dr. Boyd began her career as a drug abuse researcher in the early 1980s, when she served as project director for a National Institute on Drug Abuse project at Wayne State University studying female intravenous heroin users. She later studied women who smoke crack, before turning to substance abuse among young adults and college students. For the last decade she has f ocused on the nonmedical use of prescription medications by this population. A 2005 study conducted by Dr. Boyd found that college-age men and women were equally likely to have used illicit prescription drugs in the past year, but female students were more likely than male students to use illicit sleeping medications, sedatives, and pain medications.
Shelly Greenfield, M.D., M.P.H.
Chief Academic Officer and Director,
Clinical and Health Services Research,
Education, Division on Alcohol and Drug Abuse,
McLean Hospital, Belmont, Massachusetts
Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
Dr. Greenfield’s research concerns treatment for substance use disorders, gender differences in substance disorders, and health services for substance disorders. She currently is principal investigator of a National Institute on Drug Abuse-funded grant to design and pilot a new manual-based group therapy for women with substance use disorders. In a small initial trial, which compared the once-a-week Women’s Recovery Group to a similar mixed-gender group, “the women in both groups improved during the 12 weeks of treatment,” Dr. Greenfield says. “But the women who were in the Women’s Recovery Group seemed to continue to improve and do better over the six-month follow-up period after treatment ended.” Dr. Greenfield believes that part of the success stems from the fact that more vulnerable women, especially those with “high psychiatric-symptom severity” did better in the women-only group than those in the mixed-gender group.
Tonda Hughes, Ph.D.
Professor of Nursing,
Director, Research Core, University of Illinois at Chicago,National Center of Excellence in Women's Health
When Dr. Hughes began researching gender differences in alcohol and other drug abuse in the early 1990s, she noticed a frequent reference to a finding that a third of all lesbians were alcoholic or had serious alcohol problems. Dr. Hughes questioned this idea and worked with researcher Sharon Wilsnack at the University of North Dakota to conduct a thorough literature review, which dispelled several myths about alcohol abuse among sexual minority women. Since 1999, Dr. Hughes has conducted a longitudinal study of roughly 500 lesbian women, tracking their rates of alcohol abuse. She recently launched the third phase of the study, designed to include more women of color and younger women. The study has revealed that lesbians are not more likely than heterosexual women to be heavy drinkers. But Dr. Hughes also found that about 47 percent of the women in her study have wondered at some point if they have a drinking problem, and about 16 percent have been in treatment for alcohol-related problems, which is significantly higher than the rate among heterosexual women. New findings from Dr. Hughes’s project show that women who identify as bisexual appear to be at higher risk for alcohol problems.
Sheigla Murphy, Ph.D.
Director of Center for Substance Abuse Studies,
Institute for Scientific Analysis San Francisco
A medical sociologist, Dr. Murphy has examined drug use since the 1970s, when she first worked on a study of cocaine sellers and users. As an ethnographer, she often looks at new illicit drugs and the cultures that spring up around them. In 1999, she and Marsha Rosenbaum published Pregnant Women on Drugs: Combating Stereotypes and Stigma ( Rutgers University Press, 1999), in which they argued that pregnant substance-abusing women are the most stigmatized group in American society. And this is unfortunate, because “if a woman is pregnant and using drugs, she’s in real trouble with drugs,” Dr. Murphy says. Stigma “keeps them away from drug treatment, or even prenatal care, and that exacerbates problems for mother and baby.” S he has also conducted research on women's involvement in illicit drug sales. Dr. Murphy is currently seeking funding for a qualitative study of baby boomers (both women and men) who have used marijuana throughout adulthood.