Corey Roos, PhD, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, has been awarded a K23 career development grant from the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH).
The grant, “Web-Based Mindfulness Treatment to Prevent Relapse to Substance Use,” is co-funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). It aims to develop and evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of a self-guided multimedia web-based version of a treatment for substance use disorders called mindfulness-based relapse prevention (MBRP).
MBRP is designed to prevent relapse after people have received initial treatment, such as inpatient or intensive outpatient treatment, and already made some treatment gains.
MBRP focuses on teaching people mindfulness-based coping skills, including awareness skills like pausing, acknowledging emotions or cravings in the moment, and responding with awareness, as well as acceptance skills like tolerating distressing experiences and treating oneself with compassion during hard times.
Roos’ research has found that MBRP may be most effective among people with substance use disorder who have co-occurring anxiety and depressive disorders.
Although MBRP has been found to be an effective treatment for preventing relapse, not many clinicians are trained in MBRP, and accessing MBRP treatment is not easy for most patients. Roos’ work on web-based MBRP has the potential to make this treatment vastly more accessible for patients.
Mentors and collaborators on the grant include Yale Department of Psychiatry faculty Kathleen Carroll, PhD; Brian Kiluk, PhD; and Hedy Kober, PhD.
Roos is a clinical psychologist with expertise in treatment for substance use disorders. As a researcher, he is particularly interested in developing and studying self-guided technology-based treatments, such as multimedia web programs and mobile smartphone apps, that teach people coping skills and assist them in using these skills in their everyday life.
He believes that technology-based treatment tools for addiction will play an increasingly important role over time, particularly as adjunctive tools that supplement in-person services and help individuals during the recovery process in the long-term.
The grant discussed in this article was awarded by the National Center For Complementary & Integrative Health of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number K23AT011342. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.