David A. Patterson Silver Wolf has over 15 years of experience providing clinical services in the substance use disorder treatment field. Patterson Silver Wolf investigates how empirically supported interventions are implemented in community-based services, specifically as it relates to therapist and organizational characteristics.
Patterson Silver Wolf is a faculty scholar in the Washington University Institute for Public Health, a faculty affiliate in the Center for Violence and Injury Prevention, and serves as training faculty for two NIH- funded (T32) training programs at the Brown School, including the Transdisciplinary Training in Addictions Research program of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
Patterson Silver Wolf also studies factors that improve underrepresented minority college students’ academic success. He is specifically interested in American Indian/Alaska Native health and wellness, particularly issues related to college retention.
At the Brown School he teaches substance abuse courses, chairs the American Indian and Alaska Native concentration in the Master of Social Work program, and works closely with Kathryn M. Buder Center Scholars.
After a decade of suffering from a still-raging opioid epidemic, after a century in which our advances in the treatment of substance use disorder can be counted on one or two hands, an overreaction to the treatment of addiction—mobile treatment, treatment guided by real-time data, treatment that follows patients back to their community—is very much overdue.
It is time to bring this kind of real-time outcome data to America’s addiction crisis and make it available to the public. It’s the only way of knowing if what we’re doing to address the problem is making a difference.
Similar to treatment resistant depression, there is a subpopulation of those addicted to opioids who do not respond to standard opioid use disorder treatments. In a new paper, an addiction expert at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis suggests a new category for these types of patients: treatment resistant opioid use disorder.
We are now in a renaissance period where psychedelic drugs are being reestablished as a new approach to very important public health problems. With protocol-driven specific trials, they might become critical medications for a wide range of psychiatric disorders, such as depression, PTSD, anxiety, and addictions.
As long as a racially and culturally homogeneous group of health leaders and decision-makers come solely from ivory towers and governmental offices, and not from the communities in the greatest need, the most marginalized and underserved among us will continue to pay the highest price.
