IU School of Medicine Awarded $4M for Addiction Research
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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowThe U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has awarded the Indiana University School of Medicine a $4 million grant to bolster its work in addiction psychiatry and patient care. The money is earmarked for the school’s Department of Psychiatry and its Addiction Psychiatry Expansion Project.
The university says the grant will help the school train more fellows through its addiction psychiatry fellowship, hire more faculty and implement a new model of patient care developed and designed by Dr. R. A. Chambers, associate professor of psychiatry.
“Addiction psychiatry is the only physician specialty where doctors are trained to diagnose and treat both mental illness and drug addiction,” said Chambers. “Most patients with mental illness also have drug addiction and vice versa, and it’s really hard to get expert treatment for both conditions.”
IU says the School of Medicine has conducted basic science research to study the relationship between mental illness and drug addiction. They uncovered the top risk factors for drug addiction are having mental illness and being exposed to drugs early in adolescent development.
Chambers said the two are often treated as separate conditions by separate health care providers. He said having to see multiple doctors in multiple locations can make it difficult for patients to get comprehensive care.
“We train specialists to treat both addiction and mental illness because if you ignore the addiction, but only treat the mental illness, you’re not going to get very far,” Chambers said. “The addiction will fuel the mental illness, despite what you do to treat it. The same is true the other way around.”
Chambers said the funding will allow the department to train up to four fellows per year.