SAMHSA philosophy and statement on ethical principles

As the major federal agency responsible for improving the delivery and effectiveness of substance abuse and mental health services to the American public, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) is aware that its programs deal with especially sensitive issues. As a national leader in advancing effective services to persons with addictive and mental disorders, SAMHSA has stewardship over important interventions affecting personal, community, institutional, and social values. Inherent in SAMHSA's mission and goals is a commitment to protect and promote the human, civil, and legal rights and moral freedoms of those individuals and groups who participate in SAMHSA-funded activities and to demonstrate that Agency policies and procedures are congruent with publicly acceptable ethical principles and standards of conduct. A foundation of mutual trust between SAMHSA officials and participants as well as sensitivity to issues of public accountability will hasten and strengthen progress toward this shared vision.     

Paragrammatic speech without a comprehension deficit? A case report

In this article we present a case report of a patient, who had a peculiar pattern of language use following a stroke. The two most prominent features were language switches during spontaneous speech in the first months postonset, when the patient mixed English, German, and French words and utterances into his mother tongue (Dutch); clearly disturbed speech output, showing signs of word-finding problems and paragrammatism but hardly any paraphasias, while at the same time no evidence of a language disturbance could be obtained with standard clinical aphasia tests.     

Brief Therapy: Two's Company

The triad is a key element in family therapy. It is clinically useful to conceptualize it as a unit with a structure of its own. This paper suggests that a typical triadic system consists of a pair of allies and an isolate, or "odd-man-out," all of whom are "stuck" in a rigid pattern that has become dysfunctional. The therapist can break the pattern by developing interventions specifically designed to create new alliances and thus broaden the family's behavioral repertoire.     

The use of modeling to increase independent behavior

Three experiments were conducted aimed at increasing independence via use of modeling procedures in, respectively, two samples of neurotic outpatients and a sample of psychiatric inpatients. Significant gains in independence emerged in all three investigations. Subsidiary findings are reported regarding the operation in clinical contexts of ‘modeling-enhancers’ of demonstrated effectiveness in laboratory settings.     

Opinion revision and the influence of corresponding and conflicting adjectives

The hypothesis was tested that Bayes' theorem would be a good model to predict the revision of opinion about other people in the light of information about these people. This hypothesis was tested in 5 different diagnostic situations. A further purpose was to investigate the influence of corresponding and conflicting items of information on opinion revision. The items of information consisted of 4 successively presented adjectives, favorable (H) and/or unfavorable (L) ones. The Ss revised their opinion after each adjective. Each sequence of 4 adjectives was presented twice, the second time in reversed order.