Changing Addictive Behavior: Bridging Clinical and Public Health Strategies - Hardcover

'The importance of a combined clinical and public health approach is demonstrated in this book... The chapters are well organized and clearly written, and contain specific examples and extensive bibliographies.' - Readings

'This forward-looking book provides a unique contemporary perspective on the key issues involved in changing addictive behavior. It moves beyond a focus on treatment to address help-seeking processes, concepts of motivation and stages of change, brief intervention and stepped care, public health frameworks, and behavior economics and cost benefit analysis... [It] will be a valuable resource for students and practitioners in the field as well as for program managers and evaluators.' - Rudolph Moos, PhD, Stanford University School of Medicine

'This is a genuinely interesting and informative book that will contain nuggets of information even for researchers and clinicians well versed in the field. It will also provide a very useful teaching aid at graduate and undergraduate levels.' - Addiction

This volume proposes that prevailing clinical approaches to treating addictive behaviors are actually best suited to a minority of the population with problems--in the case of substance abusers, those with substantial functional impairment and physical dependence. But what about persons with mild to moderate addictive behavior problems, for whom intensive treatment may prove unnecessarily costly, disruptive, and stigmatizing? Or those substance abusers who are unable or unmotivated to abstain, but want to reduce the harm associated with drug use? Contributors draw upon cutting-edge theory and research to examine ways that traditional therapeutic treatments can be supplemented by public health interventions that extend the reach and effectiveness of care. Timely and pragmatic, the book points the way toward necessary evolution in the roles of behavior change specialists in today's challenging health care environment.