Promoting uptake of efficacious brief alcohol interventions for young adults within institutions of higher education: Challenges and opportunities.

OBJECTIVE

Despite findings indicating that college students' alcohol use remains a significant problem across institutions of higher education, the support for a strong link between excessive drinking and risk for suicide and other psychiatric comorbidities, and associations between excessive drinking and stopping out or dropping out of college, there continue to be barriers to the routine, consistent, and timely implementation of efficacious brief alcohol interventions by mental health practitioners working in college- and university-based clinical service settings. This commentary will focus on the identification of infrastructure, attitudinal, and training-related barriers to the uptake of evidence-based strategies within higher education clinical intervention settings and opportunities to address them. Barriers discussed include compromises to intervention fidelity, limited staffing and multiple and competing service demands, stigma and a lack of understanding concerning the link between alcohol use and psychiatric symptomology, and scarcity of training, professional development, and funding opportunities specifically aimed at the promotion of evidence-based practices addressing risky and excessive drinking among college students.

CONCLUSIONS

Alcohol researchers can play a key role in promoting effective, consistent, and timely implementation of efficacious brief interventions in campus-based clinical service settings through strategic engagement with college and university mental health professionals and senior-level decision-makers using a system-focused lens. Both institutional and national-level collaboration and advocacy for translational research opportunities are critical to encourage dissemination, implementation, and sustainability of efficacious brief intervention practices. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).