Research in this area involves building the knowledge base for developing or identifying interventions that have good potential for preventing or treating mental health and substance use problems, and evaluating the effectiveness of these programs. Effective interventions developed and/or evaluated have included the Safer Bars program for reducing bar violence, the Fourth R program for healthy youth relationships and Check Your Drinking, an online alcohol assessment tool.

Current projects

Interventions with high risk populations

• Developing and evaluating Internet-based interventions to promote access to evidence-base care for people with addictions concerns
• Best practices for interventions for problem gamblers in the correctional system
• Developing and evaluating an online intervention for problem gamblers 
   

Interventions with youth

• Ongoing evaluation of the impact of community-based interventions on child health and well-being including the Strengthening Families program for children of substance-abusing parents and Big Brothers Big Sisters community match programs and services 
• Identifying the effects of school culture/environment and student substance use and mental health at the high school level
• Developing and validating a measure of young men’s beliefs and attitudes toward male-to-male alcohol-related violence 
   

Interventions to reduce the consequences of drinking

• Evaluating and improving province-wide programs for convicted drinking drivers
• Identifying the motives that escalate violence in social drinking settings and developing interventions that target motives most associated with escalation 
   

Focusing on communities

• Health status and health service experiences in the LGBTQ communities Assessing how treatment programs address other mental health and addictions problems among problem gamblers
• Understanding patterns of mobility among injection drugs users in Northern areas Bringing research to Ontario communities with the mobile research lab  

Researchers

Dr. John Cunningham
Dr. David DeWit
Dr. Lori Ross
Dr. Nigel Turner
Dr. Samantha Wells