Linking trauma to substance use and cessation
The project 'Posttraumatic stress disorder and smoking cessation' (PTSD AND SMOKING) focused on Israel. This is a region where conflict and war, traumatic stress, and smoking and related problems constitute a significant public health burden.In the first study, a controlled laboratory multi-method investigation tested the relations between traumatic stress, trauma-related psychopathology and responses to smoking deprivation. The second study was a longitudinal one, tracking a community sample of smokers and non-smokers. Both cohorts had experienced a recent traumatic stress event. Their smoking and mental health outcomes were tracked over an 18-month period to identify and examine promising bio-psycho-behavioural risk processes. On the basis of results from the first two studies, researchers conducted an early intervention study, again with smokers and non-smokers recently exposed to traumatic stress. The focus was on the risk and protective processes identified in the earlier studies with respect to smoking, and substance-related and mental health outcomes. Although data from the third study are still being analysed, scientific papers are being prepared to report on the findings. Initial findings offer promising insights into the processes underlying trauma-related substance use and mental health problems. These are significant from a theoretical as well as clinical perspective. Research outcomes will prove useful for implementing innovative clinical prevention and intervention efforts. PTSD AND SMOKING has officially ended, but its team is still working to develop and study novel intervention methods targeting the key processes examined. These include a novel, computerised intervention methodology that targets attentional biases to threat, negative emotion and smoking cues. Partners are also advancing a mindfulness-based intervention. This approach targets, among others, present moment attention, cognitive processes, anxiety sensitivity and emotional distress tolerance. Project efforts and resultant insights are generating new knowledge that can be transferred to the clinical domain. As such, outcomes are slated to contribute not only to the literature on the topic, but also to prevention and intervention science and practice.
Keywords
Post-traumatic stress disorder, smoking, deprivation, conflict, psychopathology, substance use, mental health
