Destigmatizing Addiction and Raising Awareness

The United Nations World Drug Report (2019) findings confirmed that “Prevention and treatment continue to fall short in many parts of the world, with only one in seven people with drug use disorders receiving treatment each year.” This reflected an obvious gap in terms of the availability of effective treatment interventions. As an insufficently addressed issue, addiction and substance use disorders incur extensive societal and economic costs.

 

Dr. Maria Lucia Villalba Ambrosoni, MD, is a child and adolescent psychiatrist committed to helping her patients and their families manage and cope with common mental health problems. She is also an Assistant Professor in the Child and Adolescent department in the Faculty of Medicine of the University of the Republic in Uruguay. Her work focuses on psychoeducation and psychopharmacological therapies. She is a Pediatric Psychiatry consultant at the Addiction Training for Health Professionals (ATHP) program.

She remarked that there is a significant “trajectory on working with practitioners on mental health awareness,” and noted that there is an “enormous social and economic cost” associated with addiction. Dr. Villaba shares a passion for bringing awareness to and destigmatizing mental health conditions and hopes to “improve awareness of mental health problems by general practitioners, nurses, and interns by investigating, diagnosing, and referring patients with these conditions appropriately.” This, she believes, can help bring awareness to the importance of battling substance use disorders. She remains optimistic that the Program can help contribute to a changed future for public health education by “offering good quality information, online and at no cost, to help reduce barriers and disadvantages of different countries’ practitioners.”

ATHP recognizes that substance use disorders pose a great threat to public health. The priority is to prepare health care professionals to adequately screen, diagnose and treat patients with substance use disorders while also training professionals how to perform research, influence policy, and implement public health programs that result in systems changes that reduce the incidence of substance use disorders. 

Reisha Narine MSc, BSc

Reisha Narine MSc, BSc

Author

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