Community Service

CHOICES
Consumers Helping Others Improve their Condition by Ending Smoking

Dr. Williams is the founder and medical director of CHOICES, a consumer driven initiative to outreach smokers with mental illness in the community via mental health peer counselors. To learn more about the CHOICES program, please visit their website at http://www.njchoices.org

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Tobacco Free for a Healthy New Jersey - Central Region

Marc Steinberg, PhD is the Director of the Tobacco Free for a Healthy New Jersey program. This program is dedicated to promoting community health through education and outreach. To learn more about this program, please visit their website at http://tobaccofreenj.com.

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LEARNING ABOUT HEALTHY LIVING (LAHL)

Although tobacco use and dependence is very common among people with serious mental illness (SMI) and a leading cause of morbidity and mortality, treatment options are limited, especially for lower motivated smokers who may not be ready for a “quit smoking” treatment.

In collaboration with the NJ Division of Mental Health Services, three partners at UMDNJ developed a specialized group treatment intervention for this population entitled Learning about Healthy Living (LAHL). Click here to download the PDF file. Co-authors and contributors from UMDNJ included members of the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School Division of Addiction Psychiatry, University Behavioral Health Care (UBHC), and the School of Public Health-Tobacco Dependence Program. LAHL is a 20 session group treatment approach that is designed for all types of smokers with different mental health problems. The goal of the intervention is to increase individual’s awareness about the risks of tobacco use, treatment options, enhance motivation to address tobacco, and to begin by making other healthy life choices.

LAHL has been in use in mental health treatment programs in New Jersey since 2004. The LAHL treatment approach supports the current focus on wellness and recovery within the mental health field and is being used in mental health sites with great success.

The LAHL manual is now available as a publicly available resource. It is hoped that the dissemination of this valued resource will help more smokers with mental illness across the country.

We request that you please give us feedback about your experiences with the manual. (Feedback can be sent to Dr Jill Williams at williajm@umdnj.edu) If you plan to publish about this experience using the LAHL materials we would ask that you cite the source and contributing authors.

We hope that you will find the materials helpful in your clinical work helping smokers with serious mental illness.

Williams JM, Ziedonis DM, Speelman N, Vreeland B, Zechner M, Rahim R, O’Hea E. Learning about Healthy Living: Tobacco and You Manual. Revised June 2005. Supported by a grant from the NJ Division of Mental Health Services.