Most Outpatient Mental Health Clinics Dont Offer Opioid Addiction Meds [Video]

Key Takeaways

Only one-third of mental health facilities offer medications that can help people kick opioid addictionSuch medications are vastly underutilizedFacilities were more likely to offer medication treatment if they had programs to treat addiction and mental illness together

WEDNESDAY, June 19, 2024 (HealthDay News) — Only a third of outpatient mental health facilities offer medications essential for treating opioid addiction, a new study finds.

Standard care for treating people with opioid use disorder involves drugs like buprenorphine, methadone and naltrexone, which help suppress cravings and blunt the effects of narcotics.

But most front-line mental health facilities don’t offer these medications, researchers reported June 18 in the journal JAMA Network Open.

“Outpatient community mental health treatment facilities can be an important part of the treatment ecosystem for individuals with opioid use disorders,” said lead study author Jonathan Cantor, a policy researcher at RAND Corp.

For the study, researchers surveyed 450 clinics located in 20 states with the highest opioid …