Supporting Treatment Access and Recovery for Co-Occurring Opioid Use and Mental Health Disorders (1R01MH128904-010)

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The UMass Chan Medical School, Department of Psychiatry has received NIH funding for a grant entitled “Supporting Treatment Access and Recovery for Co-occurring Opioid Use and Mental Health Disorders” (grant # 1 R01 MH128904-01). This study is part of the NIH Helping to End Addiction Long-term^SM Initiative, or NIH HEAL Initiative^SM (https://heal.nih.gov), and involves partners from the UMass Chan Medical School Center of Excellence in Addiction, the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and the University of Texas, Austin, and includes collaborations with the Right Choice Health Group, the Gavin Foundation, Harvard Medical School, Yale, and state partners.

This study will examine the efficacy of MISSION, a team based multicomponent intervention for co-occurring mental health and substance use (see https://www.missionmodel.org for more information on MISSION). This study will test MISSION as a whole or its parts in addition to Medication for Opioid use Disorder (MOUD) and the cost implications for opioid addiction.

We are very excited and feel honored to have received close to 13 million in NIMH funding for this 4-year project. In many ways, this is the culmination of 20 years of work we have done on this MISSION Model. We hope this grant will answer some critical questions for the field and bring us closer to offering more personalized medicine in opioid addiction. Through these NIMH funds, we will be able to hire 19 new clinical staff and offer services to 1,000 people with opioid addiction.

This study will be led by Dr. David Smelson (corresponding principal investigator (PI)), and PIs Drs. Gerardo Gonzalez, Wenjun Li, and Todd Olmstead, as well as a team of Co-Is: Drs. Ayorkor Gaba, Beth Epstein, Dan Berlowitz, and Paige Shaffer. For more information, please contact Dr. David Smelson at David.Smelson@umassmed.edu.