7 January 2013: Launched in early December, the NHMRC-funded Centre of Research Excellence  in Mental Health and Substance Use (CRE) has been created to 'build much needed research capacity in the area of comorbid mental health and substance use disorders'.

From the CRE’s launch materials:
‘The CRE represents a world first, bringing together the largest concentration of nationally and internationally recognised comorbidity researchers. Specifically, the CRE brings together leading research academics from four Australian universities (University of New South Wales; University of Newcastle; University of Sydney; and Macquarie University) and three international universities (University of Birmingham, UK; Northwestern University Medical School, USA; and the Medical University of South Carolina, USA).

The CRE aims to generate new research to increase the knowledge base regarding the effective prevention and treatment to comorbid mental health and substance use disorders. These aims will be achieved via three research streams focusing on the prevention, treatment and epidemiology of comorbid mental health and substance use disorders. In addition to making the findings of their research available in the scientific literature, an integral component of this CRE is the translation of these research findings into educational curricula, training programs and clinical resources, as well as resources for the general public.’

• Find out more at the CRE website .
  
• You can download the first edition of the CRE newsletter here (and subscribe here)
  
• You can also follow CRE progress on Twitter and by liking the CRE on Facebook .
  

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8th Nov 2012: Helen Mentha and Dr Kylie Thomson, with the support of Commonwealth Capacity Building funding through Inner East Community Health, have produced a guide to therapeutic process and formulation, Engaging Conversations: Substance Use and Therapeutic Process.

Excerpt:

One of the challenges facing the AOD clinician is “How do I work on the substance use with this person?” when the client may be facing vastly different concerns than the people attending the appointment before or after. One source of complexity arises when people are experiencing concurrent mental health concerns, whether they be commonly experienced symptoms of depression or anxiety through to less typical conditions such as borderline personality disorder or schizophrenia.

There has been a growing awareness over the last ten to fifteen years that we need to become more aware and skilled in working with clients with coexisting mental health and substance use concerns. This has led to a welcome increase in funding initiatives, skill development and manuals that aim to build the capacity of workers and services to provide more effective care for clients with multiple presenting issues. These resources have addressed various important aspect of the work, including service structure, screening and assessment tools, treatment modalities and collaboration with other services.

And yet in the face of so much knowledge, it is still not always easy to know what we need to do when we are there in the counselling room, sitting with that complexity and its many uncertainties. This guide is intended to complement existing resources by offering some practical ideas about how to take some of the complexity of working with co-existing concerns into account when you are engaging clients and working out together how you could be most helpful to them.

This free, 90 page manual is a more than valuable resource for clinicians, in any service setting, who wish to further develop their ability to engage with and respond effectively to people with complex presentations.  It can be downloaded from the Mentha Consulting website or the Inner East Community Health Service website.

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29 October 2012: Gippsland dual diagnosis workers have, to date, published 3 editions of an information-packed newsletter, the Gippsland Dual Diagnosis News. These newsletters provide a wealth of information about dual diagnosis capacity building activities in Gippsland. The newsletters include articles on specific co-occurring mental health-substance use concerns, program and worker profiles as well as education and portfolio holder meeting calendars.

You can now download all editions to date from this site:

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