How can we make the jobs of substance abuse counselors easier?

Cailyn Green, Assistant Professor of Addiction Studies at SUNY Empire State University, examines one resource designed to do so.

Cailyn Green, MS, Ph.D., Masters-CASAC is the Assistant Professor of Addiction Studies at SUNY Empire State University. Her research in the substance use field a supported by her past clinical experience.

She earned her BA degree in psychology from Wester New England University, her MS degree in forensic mental health from Sage Graduate School and her Ph.D. in criminal justice with a specialization in addiction science from Walden University. Dr. Green is also a Credentialed Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Counselor in New York State. Dr. Greens area of expertise is supporting clinicians who work in the addiction field to best serve their clients. She spent her hands on clinical time working directly with the recently incarcerated population.

The Group Counseling Workbook was created to offer clinical counselors a free resource they can use to make their jobs a little bit easier. This workbook was first written for active counselors in the field and it can be used as an educational component for trainees, interns or new counselors as well as seasoned counselors. The Group Counseling Workbook is a free open education resource that anyone can download and change under its Creative Commons publication. 

This workbook was developed based on research I conducted investigating what resources could help our substance use counselors do their jobs. The research involved 15 participants who were all actively working as counselors in the substance use field. Their experience included working in inpatient, outpatient, residential and detox facilities. Their education ranged from associates degrees to masters degrees and years of working in the field varied from 1 to42 years. Participants who completed the qualitative interviews reported that lack of time and lack of free resources created stress in their daily work. They identified that they would use a group counseling resource to help them facilitate strong clinical group sessions.  

The goal of this Group Counseling Workbook is for counselors to use it for free, but also to hopefully send additional group counseling activities so we can continue to grow this free resource. This resource is being housed in the SUNY Empire State University online library. This free resource should lighten the workload for our substance use counselors who are actively working in the front lines.   

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Group Counseling Workbook

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We need new tools for wildfire prevention going forward.

Elahe Soltanaghai, assistant professor of computer science and electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, aims to deliver one.

Elahe Soltanaghai is an assistant professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research spans the areas of wireless networking and sensing with applications in IoT, Cyber-Physical Systems, and Mixed Reality. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her PhD in Computer Science from University of Virginia. Her work has been published in premier conferences and journals in the areas of mobile and ubiquitous computing and network systems. She has been named one of the 10 Rising Star Women in Networking and Communications in 2021. She is also the recipient of Google Research Scholar Award (2022), and ACM SIGMOBILE Dissertation Award (2021).

Wildfires are unpredictable, fast-moving, and devastating. Making them even harder to manage is fuel hidden beneath the trees – dry vegetation on the forest floor that can turn a small fire into an uncontrollable blaze. Traditional remote sensing tools struggle to see through the dense canopy and assess what’s underneath, leaving a critical gap in wildfire prediction and prevention.

That’s where our work comes in. We’re developing a drone-based system equipped with ultra-wideband radar that penetrates the canopy and maps understory fuel conditions with high precision – offering analysis that can estimate fuel load, moisture content, and distribution beneath the trees.

A key innovation in our system is the use of backscatter tags – tiny, battery-free devices that act as passive radar reflectors. These tags are strategically placed in fire-prone areas and are designed to enhance the radar’s ability to detect and characterize ground-level fuels. By modulating their reflections, the tags provide additional signal contrast, allowing us to differentiate dry vegetation from non-fuel objects like rocks or damp soil. This improves the accuracy of fuel mapping and enables continuous long-term monitoring without requiring power sources in the field.

Our system will also merge data from drones, radar, and satellites to build better wildfire prediction models. By equipping firefighters and forest managers with real-time data, this system has the potential to prevent disasters before they happen.

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On this Student Spotlight: Can we grow food on Mars?

Robert Cheatham, PhD student in chemical engineering at the Florida Institute of Technology, digs into the regolith to find out.

Robert Cheatham is a PhD student and researcher pursuing a doctoral degree in chemical engineering at Florida Institute of Technology (Florida Tech) in Melbourne, Florida. An award-winning researcher, Cheatham earned his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering with a minor in nanotechnology and nanoscience from Florida Tech, where he served as president of the student chapter of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. He won best in show at the 2024 Northrup Grumman Showcase for his work on methanol conversion from cruise ship food waste, earned first place for his research in advanced chemically activated biochar, and was selected as the outstanding student of the year by Florida Tech’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering.

The future of space exploration calls for colonizing Mars in the decades ahead.  The top five commodities required for human settlement there are energy, oxygen, construction materials, water, and food. Science confirms that the first four are abundant in economically viable concentrations and in forms that can likely be extracted, obtained or created on Mars.

Food, however, remains the biggest challenge on the list. Given the significant payload weight associated with transporting food, colonists will need to grow much of what they will eat to survive.

The challenge is that the Martian regolith—the “soil” that exists there, as it stands alone with its poor water retention and low carbon content, is not the greatest “soil” for growing much of anything.

Regolith is primarily a bunch of metals. It’s basically all rust, much like the stuff that comes off of our shovels and other tools after they’ve been sitting in the tool shed for a few months.

And, just as we cannot send tons of food into space, we cannot ship tons of dirt to Mars for farming purposes. So we will need to work with the regolith, to enrich it and improve it, to grow crops to feed space colonists.

My research explores how we can modify the regolith to make something new that can be used for agriculture–and that will also hold and retain water, which will be an available yet precious commodity on Mars. We have confirmed that, by creating a composite substance by incorporating biochar, an activated carbon similar to charcoal produced from burning biomass, and mixing it with regolith, we can accomplish both.

The process creates a brand-new substance using heat, energy, and waste in which we can grow food.

It’s renewable and reusable.

And it’s not going to run out on Mars.

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On New York University Week: Eliminating bias in AI will require work.

Meredith Broussard, professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, examines strategies to do so.

Data journalist Meredith Broussard is a professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University, research director at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology, and the author of several books, including “More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech” and “Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World.”

My research is about the many ways that AI systems reproduce real-world biases and inequality. In my research I find that all AI systems discriminate by default.

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Grief carries many myths.

Jacob Sawyer, assistant professor of psychology at Alma College, determines what’s real and what’s not.

Jacob Sawyer is a counseling psychologist interested in factors related to mental health and well-being. His background and training as a clinician strongly inform his approach to his work as a faculty member. His career at Alma began in 2022.

Do beliefs that people endorse about grief and bereavement correspond with recent research findings? It is likely that some do not, even among mental health professionals.

For the past several decades, researchers have suggested that myths about grief and bereavement are fairly common. One common myth is the notion that most people need to engage in intensive emotional expression during bereavement, or “grief work”, as originally proposed by Sigmund Freud. Another is the belief in linear stage models of grief, such as the five stages of grief. Researchers have increasingly noted that grief does not progress through predictable stages, and have cautioned that the belief in stage models of grief could actually be harmful for the bereaved.

To assess beliefs and potential myths, my co-authors and I developed a survey with 12 statements about grief and bereavement, and analyzed data from a sample of mental health professionals and the general public. While mental health professionals were less likely to endorse myths about grief and bereavement compared to the general public, 85% percent of mental health professionals significantly overestimated the proportion of individuals who go on to develop intense, long-term distress during bereavement, and close to half endorsed a belief in stage models of grief. Similarly, 68% of the general public endorsed a belief in stage models of grief.

Findings from the study highlight the work that is still necessary in promoting what researchers have termed “grief literacy”, which consists of knowledge, skills, and values related to grief. Increased grief literacy is necessary for the general public, since we will all experience grief, and for mental health professionals, who will need to competently assist bereaved individuals in their clinical work.

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How long does it take for successful abstinence from substance use?

Rafaela Fontes, research scientist at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at Virginia Tech University, takes a look.

Rafaela Fontes is a research scientist in the Addiction Recovery Research Center at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC. Her work focuses on decision-making processes in individuals with substance use disorders (SUD), using models of choice to inform more effective treatments. She also investigates factors influencing recovery, aiming to identify diverse pathways that lead to successful outcomes across different substances.

She and her colleagues from the institute drew from the International Quit & Recovery for their recent research on substance use cessation.

Relapse is common when someone is trying to quit an addiction. And even though we know addiction is a chronic condition, we treat it as an acute disorder.

My colleagues and I wanted to answer this question: How many quit attempts are needed for successful abstinence? We also wanted to know if this number was different depending on the substance someone is trying to quit.

To find out, we recruited participants from the International Quit & Recovery Registry, a tool created by the late Dr. Warren Bickel to better understand success in overcoming addiction. We drew our findings from 344 people who reported abstinence from at least one substance. Their responses showed that some substances do require more attempts, and are harder to quit.

Opioids and pain medication required significantly more attempts than all other substances — with an estimated mean around 6 attempts. Notably, substances with a higher number of quit attempts are also the ones that can bring on severe physical withdrawal symptoms, like pain, nausea, and anxiety.

Our results also showed that it took more attempts for people with a more severe or longer history of substance use to achieve abstinence. That means that early intervention is better. For those on the severe end of the spectrum, more intense or a combination of interventions might be needed.

Importantly, these numbers might not be final for every participant, as we know that relapse is common. In our sample, the average time in abstinence was more than seven years across substances.

We hope these findings help inform treatment by demonstrating that each substance is associated with unique challenges. We also hope this helps people who are going through recovery. If they know failure is part of the process, they might be encouraged to stay the course, realizing they’ll get there eventually.

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Do product reviews matter?

Ann Kronrod, associate professor of marketing at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, reads up to find out.

Ann Kronrod is an Associate Professor in the Department of Marketing, Entrepreneurship and Innovation. She earned her Ph.D. in Marketing and Cognitive Science of Language from Tel Aviv University, and later completed her education as a Postdoctoral Researcher at MIT, Sloan School of Management. Prior to joining UMass Lowell, Ann Kronrod was an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University, and then Visiting Assistant Professor at Northeastern University and at Boston University. Ann Kronrod is a marketing researcher with extensive background in linguistics. Her research interests span a wide variety of subjects that can be categorized as marketing communication, consumer behavior, word-of-mouth and pro-social marketing. She often integrates her knowledge of linguistics in her research.

For the past 20 years, the reviews platform YELP has been providing consumers with an indispensable opportunity to share their experiences at restaurants, medical facilities, and so on. Learning from hundreds of consumers improves our judgment about products and services, but with the recent proliferation of AI-generated reviews, fake reviews are becoming an epidemic. Sadly, we, humans, are awful at telling truth from a lie. We are correct about 51%-54% of the time, which is basically the rate of flipping a coin.

I’ve been investigating Language in Marketing for the past 20 years and together with my colleagues[1] I developed an algorithm that detects fake reviews by the language they use. We found that if a consumer tried the product, their vocabulary comes from episodic memory of their experience and will contain more concrete and unique words, and sentences that relate to the what–where–when (WWW) of the experience. By contrast, if you are just making up a fake review, you simply won’t have those words in your vocabulary. Instead, you will be using words from your semantic memory: memory of general facts faintly related to the experience. So, your language will be more abstract and general and it will be unrelated to time and place. We ended up with an algorithm that detects fake reviews by their language and can be used on any set of reviews.

This way, our research helps platforms like YELP overcome these negative developments threatening consumer-firm trust and customer experience.

[1] Kronrod, Gordeliy and Lee 2023

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The mental wellbeing of those with “good jobs” can still suffer.

Ivy Bourgeault, professor in the school of sociological and anthropological studies at the University of Ottawa, determines what can be done.

Dr. Ivy Bourgeault is a Professor in the School of Sociological and Anthropological Studies at the University of Ottawa and the University Research Chair in Gender, Diversity and the Professions. She has garnered an international reputation for her research on the health workforce, particularly from a gender lens, with a recent focus on the psychological health and safety of professional work.

Getting into a profession is a highly coveted achievement. It’s what every parent encourages of their children, because these are considered the ‘good jobs.’ Yet, the stressful and demanding nature of their work takes a toll on their mental health.

Research we conducted in Canada reveals that there are high levels of work stress and workloads among professional workers, particularly during the pandemic. Women in the professions report significantly higher rates of work stress as well as life stress, related to the time pressures they experience and caring for children.

We also found that stigma surrounding the disclosure of mental health among professional workers prevents many from taking a leave of absence to address these concerns.

Take health professions for example. Health professional workers report higher levels of stress, burnout, anxiety, depression and substance use than the general public. As a result, health professionals have higher rates of absenteeism due to illness and injury than those in other occupations.

Factors that encouraged health professionals to take a mental health leave included having supportive colleagues, supervisors and family. Support from colleagues and supervisors, as well as supportive workplace policies, programs and services and workplace accommodations, were also cited as factors making it easier for health professionals to return after taking a leave.

Overall, our study results underscore the need to recognize and de-stigmatize the mental health issues experienced by professional workers, as well as among their colleagues and employers.

Further, there is a need to take a gender-sensitive approach to develop more targeted and appropriate workplace mental health promotion initiatives that take professional workers full lives into account.

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https://www.ivylynnbourgeault.ca/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivy-bourgeault-377b7351/

X: https://twitter.com/DrIvyBourgeault

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