Dartmouth-Hitchcock
Dartmouth’s Department of Psychiatry is fortunate to have tremendous academic strength – we direct this capacity toward the pressing health needs we see in our community. Our efforts inform local care and our discoveries (and trainees) have an impact across the globe.
One such challenge is addiction and the suffering it brings. Northern New England is very beautiful but is not exempt from substance use disorders: New Hampshire has the highest per capita opioid death rate in the country, marijuana is increasingly available and people need guidance about its health risks and treatment, and, as is true everywhere, alcohol takes its toll. Our community of researchers, clinicians and teachers band together to advance knowledge and treatment effectiveness and capacity.
We work in our clinical settings to improve and standardize how we identify and address the range of substance use difficulties in the sites where they commonly present – emergency rooms, primary care offices, and on medical/surgical inpatient units; we develop and test team-based care for the treatment of addiction in pregnant women so that their children will have a chance to have healthy lives; we carefully study how mobile technology can extend the reach of current person-provided treatment; we investigate marijuana to bring science to the care we provide and to the political debate all around us; we use our model clinical settings to train the workforce we need today and tomorrow; and we investigate the basic neuroscience of reward circuitry in an effort to identify who is at risk and to address addiction much more effectively in a personalized manner.
