Heads UP, A Harm Reduction Approach to Problematic Drinking Prevention and Intervention: A Manualized Treatment Program

Heads UP is a harm reduction-based drinking prevention and research project that seeks to promote healthy behavioral choices among college students. Heads UP began as a collaborative project between Dr. Joseph LaBrie and the Heads UP team and the Department of Student Affairs at Loyola Marymount University. The present manual is designed to provide appropriate personnel a step by step process for implementing an empirically validated approach to reduce alcohol-related risk among students in small group settings, as well as ways to enhance risk-reducing programming on campuses. The authors use a Motivational Interviewing approach as well as utilizing the latest research in multi-component interventions to address alcohol misuse and abuse among today's youth. Included are explanations of the theoretical underpinning and scientific research supporting the effectiveness of these interventions, as well as intervention protocol including steps for pre and post evaluation, outline of actual facilitator dialogue, and examples of intervention worksheets.

Dr. Joseph LaBrie is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Loyola Marymount University and is the Director of the Heads UP Responsible Drinking Project. He received his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Southern California in 2002. LaBrie conducts alcohol related research at the University in hopes of reducing problematic drinking among college students, changing campus culture, and reducing recidivism among high risk mandated students. LaBrie's most successful research endeavor is Heads UP, a brief Motivational Interviewing based intervention funded by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. LaBrie has published over 65 articles in several scholarly peer-reviewed journals based on this body of work. His hope is to spread the success of Heads UP to other colleges, universities, and treatment facilities.