Federal Resources

As featured by the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, the University of Minnesota released a study, Academic Achievement Trajectories of Homeless and Highly Mobile Students: Resilience in the Context of Chronic and Acute Risk, which examined academic achievement of students identified as homeless or highly mobile as compared with other students in the federal free meal program, reduced price meals, or neither. This study was partially federally funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Science Foundation. 

This brochure describes changes in the brain that occur during the teen years, and the significance of this stage of development.

To address the challenges faced by students living in communities of concentrated poverty, Promise Neighborhoods grantees and their partner organizations will plan to provide services from early learning to college and career, including programs to improve the health, safety, and stability of neighborhoods, and boost family engagement in student learning.

Minority Mental Health Month provided an opportunity to raise awareness of how mental health and substance use issues affect ethnic minority groups. This blog post, written by a SAMHSA intern and member of the Rosebud Sioux and Oglala Sioux Tribes, describes a personal journey with addiction and provides hope and encouragement to tribal youth, tribal leaders, scholars, and community members to seek help and promote recovery and healing.

Start the Talk is the newest component of SAMHSA's "Talk. They Hear You." Underage Drinking Prevention National Media Campaign aimed to reduce underage drinking among youth ages 9 to 15. This online role-play tool gives parents and caregivers the opportunity to practice talking with their children about underage drinking, helping to build practical skills and confidence to conduct these conversations in real life. 

In this blog post, SAMHSA's Pamela Hyde announces her resignation and recounts SAMHSA’s accomplishments and its federal partners during her tenure. 

As highlighted in a recent blog post by HHS officials, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released a new report, “Psychosocial Interventions for Mental and Substance Use Disorders.” The report is a result of a collaboration to identify key steps to ensure individuals receiving mental health and substance use services receive evidence-based, high-quality care. It details the reasons for the gap between what is effective and what is currently practiced, and it offers recommendations for how best to address this gap. It proposes a framework to establish standards for psychosocial interventions. The HHS blog post addresses how SAMHSA, ASPE, and other HHS agencies will implement the recommendations in the report. 

This PSA for SAMHSA's "Talk. They Hear You." campaign encourages parents, particularly fathers, to start an open dialogue with their children at a young age about drinking. 

This resource provides parents with information that can help them talk to their college-bound children about alcohol-use consequences. It also includes a companion video that illustrates the academic and health consequences of underage drinking for new college freshmen.

SAMHSA’s 2014 National Survey on Drug Use and Health report shows progress in reducing substance use, especially among adolescents. However, it also indicates that adolescents are experiencing higher levels of depression than in past years. 

This blog post describes the Resource Guide for Reporting on Behavioral Health: How You Talk About It Matters, which provides information to the media about mental illness and substance use disorders. It also includes tips and supporting facts that can help ensure representations of mental illness and substance use disorders are fair, balanced, and accurate. 

This blog post describes the benefits of participating in sports, as well as the risks. It highlights many of the programs and resources available to support athletes who may be struggling with mental illness or substance abuse. 

This extended PSA for "Don't Be a Friend. Be A Parent." shows parents the negative consequences of hosting an underage drinking party. 

This PSA video for SAMHSA's "Talk. They Hear You." campaign encourages parents to start an open dialogue with their children at a young age about drinking. 

SAMHSA offers many of its resources in an eBook format, allowing readers to access these materials more easily on mobile devices, tablets, and e-readers. 

For some students, test anxiety can be so great that it affects their ability to perform their best. This resource can help parents as they discuss testing with their child and create a home environment that is conducive to academic success.

This study tracked substance use initiation patterns by month for college students, ages 18-22. Results show that initiation of marijuana and alcohol use often peak in the summer months, while winter appears to be the peak season for students to start using prescription drugs. 

SAMHSA released a series of behavioral health barometers presenting data for each of the 10 HHS regions of the United States. Each report uses data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health related to youth and adult mental health and substance use and treatment. 

NCSCW offers free online tutorials for a wide variety of professionals related to substance abuse disorders, treatment, and recovery. NCSACW requires users to register online before access these courses:

1. Understanding Child Welfare and the Dependency Court: A Guide for Substance Abuse Treatment Professionals
2. Understanding Substance Use Disorders, Treatment, and Family Recovery: A Guide for Child Welfare Professionals
3. Understanding Substance Use Disorders, Treatment, and Family Recovery: A Guide for Legal Professionals

This Quick Guide describes brief intervention and brief therapy techniques for treatment of alcohol abuse and drug abuse, including brief cognitive-behavioral, strategic/ interactional, humanistic and existential, psychodynamic, family, and time-limited group therapies. 

This resource provides families and friends with information about medication-assisted treatment for opioid addiction. It describes prescribed opioid medications, their proper use and side effects, withdrawal symptoms, and how medications fit with counseling in the recovery process. 

This website features information to help healthcare providers and organizations learn about Screening, Brief Intervention and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT), an evidence-based practice used to identify, reduce, and prevent the use and abuse of alcohol and drugs. The site includes basic information, training materials, workflow charts and diagrams, and information on financing. 

This report (PDF, 7 pages) presents facts about substance use among college students, ages 18 to 22, using combined data from the 2011 to 2014 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. According to the report, more than one-third of college students engaged in binge drinking, and about one in five used an illicit drug in the last month. 

This article (PDF, 19 pages) summarizes the relationship between substance use and suicide and provides state and tribal prevention professionals with information on the scope of the problem, an understanding of traditional barriers to collaboration and current programming, and ways to work together on substance misuse and suicide prevention strategies. 

These tools (PDF, 4 pages) are available for practitioners to assess community readiness for preventing substance misuse.