Psychiatric disorders, particularly substance use disorders, are an impactful and highly prevalent public health concern in youth from low-income neighborhoods (YLINs). Indeed, prevention and intervention programs for mental health disorders that have evidenced improvements in youth from general population are not well integrated into community…

Senate Bill (SB) 163 would alter the current law that requires coverage of behavioral health treatment (BHT) for autistic spectrum disorder (ASD). SB 163 would expand the definition of BHT to include treatment modalities based on developmental theory, would make technical changes to definitions related to network adequacy, would prohibit denial of…

Adverse parenting practices, including child maltreatment, interfere with children's adjustment and life outcomes. In this article, Ronald Prinz describes the Triple P--Positive Parenting Program, designed to improve parenting population-wide. Prinz offers four main reasons to take a population approach. First, official records grossly…

Many students today struggle with stress and anxiety caused by increasing academic, social, and extracurricular demands. This book provides school psychologists, counselors, teachers, and other school faculty with guidelines for improving students' mental and physical well-being, which in turn leads to improved academic performance and happier,…

Prompting procedures have been used in community settings to change many public health related behaviors. The current study took place on a college campus and used a multiple baseline across settings design to evaluate the effectiveness of visual prompts to decrease urinal splatter on men's restroom floors. Results indicate that prompts were…

For decades, the HIV epidemic has exacted an enormous toll worldwide. However, trend analyses have discerned significant declines in the overall prevalence of HIV over the last two decades. More recently, advances in biomedical, behavioural, and structural interventions offer considerable promise in the battle against generalised epidemics.…

Uganda is recognised as an early success story in the HIV epidemic at least in part due to an open and vigorous national dialogue about HIV prevention. This study examined the national discourse about HIV, AIDS, and young people in New Vision, Uganda's leading national newspaper between 1996 and 2011, building from a previous archival analysis of…

In recent years, ecological perspectives have become more visible in prevention, health promotion, and public health within the school context. Individually based approaches to understanding and changing behavior have been increasingly challenged by these perspectives because of their appreciation for contextual influences on individual behavior.…

This review identifies studies describing interventions delivered across both the home and school/community setting, which target obesity and weight-related nutrition and physical activity behaviors in children. Fifteen studies, published between 1998 and 2010, were included and evaluated for effectiveness, study quality, nutrition/activity…

This article provides a theory-based, step-by-step approach to intervention development and illustrates its application in India to design an intervention to promote tobacco-use cessation among school personnel in Bihar. We employed a five-step approach to develop the intervention using the Social Contextual Model of Health Behavior Change (SCM)…

Lay health advisers (LHAs) are increasingly used to deliver tobacco dependence treatment, especially with low-socioeconomic status (SES) populations. More information is needed about treatment adherence to help interpret mixed evidence of LHA intervention effectiveness. This study examined adherence to behavioral counseling and nicotine patches in…

Background: The disparity in rates of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), HIV/AIDS, and unplanned pregnancy between Alaska Native (AN) and non-AN populations, particularly among young adults and females, is significant and concerning. Focus groups were conducted to better understand the knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs of rural Alaska youth…

Objective: Motivational interviewing (MI) is a treatment approach that has been widely examined as an intervention for tobacco dependence and is recommended in clinical practice guidelines. Previous reviews evaluating the efficacy of MI for smoking cessation noted effects that were modest in magnitude but included few studies. The current study is…

Objective: A randomized controlled trial was conducted to evaluate the efficacy of a cognitive-behavioral (CBT) intervention to prevent perinatal depression in high-risk Latinas. Method: A sample of 217 participants, predominantly low-income Central American immigrants who met demographic and depression risk criteria, were randomized into usual…

Childhood obesity is a significant public health concern. Since 1960, the prevalence of childhood obesity in the United States increased dramatically from 5% to 16.9%. To date many interventions to address obesity in schools have focused on healthy changes to the content of vending machines, school lunches, and the addition of after school…