Jeffrey R. Lacasse

Jeffrey R. Lacasse
Florida State University | FSU · College of Social Work

Ph.D.

About

98
Publications
117,447
Reads
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1,685
Citations
Introduction
Jeffrey R. Lacasse is Associate Professor, College of Social Work, Florida State University.
Additional affiliations
August 2019 - August 2019
Florida State University
Position
  • Professor (Associate)
August 2013 - present
Florida State University
Position
  • Professor (Assistant)
August 2008 - May 2013
Arizona State University
Position
  • Professor (Assistant)

Publications

Publications (98)
Article
Full-text available
Mental health services are provided to people diagnosed with mental disorders to foster rehabilitation by enhancing emotional and behavioral functioning. The purpose of this project was to understand from the perspective of service recipients what aspects of services they found most helpful in facilitating the process of recovery. Using a sequentia...
Article
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This qualitative study examined the client experience of psychiatric medication among an unusual and under-studied subpopulation, individuals diagnosed with SMI who eventually experienced functional recovery. Four themes emerged from in-depth qualitative interviews with 16 such individuals: (1) primacy of medication, (2) informed consent, (3) self-...
Article
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The macro landscape shaping antidepressant use is marked by uncertain and contested research and vigorous pharmaceutical promotion to doctors and (in the U.S.) patients. While prior studies have investigated antidepressant users’ firsthand experiences of the impacts of medication use on their lives and identities, these studies do not explicitly si...
Chapter
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This chapter addresses potential barriers to good clinical decision-making, found at all levels of practice. It begins with decision-making at the micro-level -that is, at the level of the individual clinician, who faces a series of decisions with each new case: How to frame problems, what outcomes to pursue, when to stop collecting information, wh...
Article
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Purpose Depression is one of the most commonly treated conditions in mental health practice. However, outcomes have been poor and social workers face a host of treatment-related dilemmas. Method This study used factorial survey methodology to disentangle the effects of client, practice, and respondent characteristics on master's in social work (MS...
Article
In recent years, the veracity of scientific findings has come under intense scrutiny in what has been called the “replication crisis.” This crisis is marked by the propagation of scientific claims which were subsequently contested, found to be exaggerated, or deemed false. This article describes the replication crisis and identifies examples of unr...
Article
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Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is poorly understood and frequently diagnosed in mental health practice. Qualitative thematic analysis from interviews with 20 licensed clinical social workers (LCSWs) was conducted to evaluate clinicians’ perceptions, sources of information, and use of the chemical imbalance theory (CIT) during interactions with cli...
Preprint
Full-text available
Background: Military veterans represent a disproportionate number of suicides that occur in the U.S. Antidepressants have been associated with increased risk of suicidal thoughts/behaviors and completed suicide. Given the high number of psychotropic medications prescribed to the veteran population, it is salient that any relationship between vetera...
Article
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In this article, we offer a primer on “classical” frequentist statistics. In doing so, we aim to (1) provide social workers with a nuanced overview of common statistical concepts and tools, (2) clarify ways in which these ideas have oft been misused or misinterpreted in research and practice, and (3) help social workers better understand what frequ...
Article
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The prescription of psychotropic drugs to children in the child welfare system has rightfully attracted increased public and institutional attention. Significant challenges include (1) the integrity of the scientific literature that concerns the use of psychotropic drugs; (2) the nature and scope of the influence of pharmaceutical companies on pres...
Presentation
Full-text available
ABSTRACT Introduction. The veracity of scientific findings in the biomedical and social sciences has come under intense scrutiny over the last two decades in what has been called the “replication crisis”. Though a key contributor to the development of social welfare policy and a primary creator/consumer of social welfare research, social workers h...
Article
This study reports on a mixed-methods evaluation of the impacts of an educational curriculum designed to engage psychosocial professionals in child welfare in critical thinking about psychotropic medication-related issues. Caseworkers in two counties (n=20) received the curriculum and were compared at baseline and 30-day follow-up to caseworkers (n...
Article
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Peer caregivers are specially-trained incarcerated persons who support the needs of patients in correctional health care settings. Their role is of particular importance in light of the growing population of older adult prisoners with complex health problems in U.S. prisons. The purpose of the current study was to examine the disparity between pati...
Article
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Self-directed care (SDC) is a service delivery model in which individuals diagnosed with a severe and persistent mental illness (SPMI) direct their behavioral healthcare by managing an individual budget and purchasing the goods and services they deem most helpful in meeting their needs and supporting their recovery. Participants may purchase conven...
Article
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A significant treatment gap exists for incarcerated men with lifetime traumatic experiences. A small research base for trauma interventions for incarcerated women is emerging, but incarcerated men have largely been ignored. Men comprise 90% of the incarcerated population and are at the greatest risk to be re-arrested for a new crime after release....
Article
Youth in the child welfare system are often at increased risk for suicide due to the numerous physical and psychological challenges they face. This study was a longitudinal assessment of the impact of suicide intervention training on staff’s abilities to identify, assess, and intervene when working with these youth in a child welfare setting. Parti...
Article
Adverse effects (AEs) are an important factor in antidepressant treatment decision-making, though common AE profiles from clinical trial research highlight physical AEs to the neglect of emotional and behavioral AEs. First-hand accounts of antidepressant users on the Internet can supplement AE profiles with information gained from real-world treatm...
Article
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As youth near the transition to adulthood and aging out of the foster care system, exposure to stress increases, especially for youth who have less than adequate support systems. Although mental health problems among foster youth often continue into adulthood, service use decreases dramatically within a year of turning 18. Understanding how foster...
Article
Social workers’ unique skills and professional perspective can contribute to improved practices in psychopharmacology, yet it is unclear how social work programs prepare students for this area of practice. This study examined instruction of psychopharmacology through a national Web-based survey of MSW program directors and instructors of psychophar...
Article
Full-text available
Social workers’ unique skills and professional perspective can contribute to improved practices in psychopharmacology, yet it is unclear how social work programs prepare students for this area of practice. This study examined instruction of psychopharmacology through a national Web-based survey of MSW program directors and instructors of psychophar...
Conference Paper
Quality of life is a multidimensional and highly subjective measure of well-being. Self-assessed quality of life ratings, moreover, are essential in patient-centered care models and offer service providers information critical to guiding intervention. The current lecture details findings related to self-assessed quality of life in patients receivin...
Article
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With all the emphasis on having more conversation about mental health, remarkably little attention has been paid to how exactly we want to be having it. In what follows, we review five areas about which sharp differences currently exist: (1) Biology – how are physiological contributors to mental distress being framed? (2) Symptoms – how should we b...
Article
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There is now almost universal acknowledgement that too many children in the United States have been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADHD).Over the past decade, the age range for those diagnosed with ADHD has greatly expanded – in both directions. At one end of the spectrum, many adults are now labeled with “Adult ADHD,” and at the other...
Article
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Objective: Self-directed care (SDC) is a mental health service delivery model in which participants budget the state dollars allotted for their care to purchase the goods and services they deem most appropriate for achieving their recovery goals. This study examines the demographic characteristics, service utilization patterns, and outcomes of indi...
Article
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This article documents one woman's experience of mental health recovery using a case study approach. Specifically, qualitative data collected through a semistructured interview were triangulated with the medical record to understand more about how this woman experienced a transition from a period of her life marked by severe psychological and emoti...
Article
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Public conversation about biological contributors to mental disorder often centers on whether the problem is "biological or not." In this paper, we propose moving beyond this bifurcation to a very different question: how exactly are these problems understood to be biological? Specifically, we consider four issues around which different interpretati...
Article
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The concept of "recovery" from mental disorder is widely used in the national conversation about youth and adult mental health treatment as if everyone is on the same page about what it means. Fundamental disagreements among researchers and practitioners exist, however, on a variety of issues related to the precise nature and meaning of recovery f...
Chapter
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Chapter
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Conference Paper
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Background and Purpose: Social workers provide treatment to individuals diagnosed with psychotic disorders and are actively involved with their clients' use of psychiatric medications as part of interdisciplinary treatment teams, often addressing medication adherence and psychoeducation. This study examined the use of evidence-based psychiatric tre...
Conference Paper
Background and Purpose: Florida Self-Directed Care (FloridaSDC) is a public mental health services program for indigent adults diagnosed with a severe and persistent mental illness. Promoted nationally as “recovery-oriented” and “person-centered,” SDC differs from traditional community-based mental health services in its “money follows the person”...
Article
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To examine psychiatric prescribing in response to perinatal/neonatal death, we analyzed data from a cross-sectional survey of 235 bereaved parents participating in an on-line support community. Of the 88 respondents prescribed medication, antidepressants were most common (n = 70, 79.5%) followed by benzodiazepines/sleep aids (n = 18, 20.5%). Many p...
Article
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This study examined health/mental health status, family functioning, and resiliency among a sample of bereaved parents (N= 503). Participants were recruited from an on-line support community to complete an on-line survey instrument (response rate = 51.75%). The questionnaire contained an array of self-report instruments, such as the Hopkins Symp...
Article
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This paper examines the economic consequences associated with the death of a child. Economic costs of child death during the first six months were estimated using the Traumatic Experiences and Resiliency Study (TEARS) dataset. Costs considered include funeral expenses, medical expenses borne by the family, and productivity losses. The findings sugg...
Article
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Objectives: To test the potential impact of a critical curriculum on psychiatric medications designed for child welfare workers. Method: In a quasiexperimental, longitudinal study, the monthly proportion of medicated foster children and the average number of prescriptions per medicated child at Agency 1 (669 clients) exposed to the CriticalThinkRx...
Article
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This article responds to Slater, Scourfield and Sloan's assessment and analysis of our earlier British Journal of Social Work article delineating the 100 most highly cited articles in disciplinary social work journals during the past decade. We address two primary issues in our response. First, we provide background on the circumstances that animat...
Conference Paper
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Background: Bibliometric methods such as citation analysis are commonly used to measure both research productivity and scholarly impact. Recently, the h-index, a popular bibliometric indicator, has been used to measure the impact of social work scholars. The h-index combines the number of articles published with the rate of citation; an academic wi...
Article
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Questions regarding the efficacy of antidepressant drugs has been a recent focus of attention in the national news both in print and in the television media. Many clients will have questions regarding what they can believe and how they can address mood problems. Social workers constitute a greater percentage of the mental health work force than any...
Article
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This essay addresses recent controversies surrounding the forthcoming fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-the first major revision of the DSM since 1994), as well as questions regarding the safety and efficacy of psychotropic medications discussed in the public domain. Mental health professionals across...
Article
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Background: There is much concern regarding undisclosed corporate authorship (“ghostwriting”) in the peer-reviewed medical literature. However, there are no studies of how disclosure of ghostwriting alone impacts the perceived credibility of research results. Findings: We conducted a randomized vignette study with experienced nurses (n = 67), usin...
Data
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Vignette 1. Traditional authorship, no ghostwriting.
Conference Paper
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Background: Bibliometric indicators are increasingly used as measures of research productivity and may be included as measurement criteria for promotion and tenure and/or funding decisions. The h-index, a bibliometric indicator used in many scientific fields, has only recently been used to measure the productivity of social work scholars. H-index v...
Article
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This article examines how the biomedical industrial complex has ensnared social work within a foreign conceptual and practice model that distracts clinical social workers from the special assistance that they can provide for people with mental distress and misbehavior. We discuss (1) social work’s assimilation of psychiatric perspectives and practi...
Article
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As public and professional attention to outcome and evaluation research grows, focus commonly remains centered on the question, “Does this treatment work or not?” Consequently, much less emphasis is given to what exactly it means for a treatment to be effective. this article examines 5 issues relevant to whether an intervention is deemed successful...
Article
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Given the importance of journal rankings to tenure, promotion, and other professional decisions, this study examines a new method for ranking social work journals. The Google Scholar h-index correlated highly with the current gold standard for measuring journal quality, Thomson Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) impact factors, but provided...
Article
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Objectives: This article reports the first estimated h-index values for social work faculty. Methods: Multiple raters blindly assessed two samples of faculty (1) tenure-track faculty at institutions listed in the U.S. News and World Report top 10 (n = 337) and (2) tenure-track editorial board members of 5 highly ranked social work journals (n = 215...
Article
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This article subjects a randomized controlled trial (RCT) published in the American Journal of Psychiatry to a methodological and statistical critique, including a reanalysis of the effect size statistics presented. The published trial tested the use of combination antidepressants (mirtazapine coprescribed with either bupropion, venlafaxine, or flu...
Article
Full-text available
As public and professional attention to outcome and evaluation research grows, focus commonly remains centered on the question, "Does this treatment work or not?" Consequently, much less emphasis is given to what exactly it means for a treatment to be effective. This article examines 5 issues relevant to whether an intervention is deemed successful...
Article
Full-text available
Examinations of highly cited articles are common in professions such as medicine as a way to enhance professional self-reflection. Yet, little research has examined influential articles in social work. In light of the emergence of a distinct disciplinary knowledge base over the past few decades, this study identifies the 100 most cited articles in...
Data
Full-text available
Vignette 1.pdf. Vignette in which the investigator has no conflicts-of-interest.
Data
Vignette 2.pdf. Vignette in which the investigator has multiple conflicts-of-interest.
Data
Data.xls. Complete dataset and codebook in Microsoft Excel format.
Article
Full-text available
While the impact of conflicts-of-interest (COI) is of increasing concern in academic medicine, there is little research on the reaction of practicing clinicians to the disclosure of such conflicts. We developed two research vignettes presenting a fictional antidepressant medication study, one in which the principal investigator had no COI and anoth...
Conference Paper
Background: Approximately 1 out of 110 pregnancies result in stillbirth, making stillbirth at least ten times more prevalent than Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Stillbirth represents a traumatic experience for many mothers, and some of those women will go on to suffer long-term psychological distress. The development of depression and/or anxiety fol...
Article
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When children are removed from their parents due to child maltreatment, the goal remains to reunite families whenever possible. Although extensive research exists regarding barriers to reunification, little is known about the families who are successfully reunited. The aim of this study was to examine the strengths families found helpful in the pro...
Article
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The Mental Illness Beliefs Inventory (MIBI) measures the extent to which an individual subscribes to the medical model of mental illness. This article reports the results of two preliminary validation studies. The first study establishes the initial psychometric properties for the MIBI, based on a sample of 222 students in the helping professions;...
Article
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Objectives: This study evaluates the utility of a new measure—the h-index—that may provide a more valid approach to evaluating journal quality in the social work profession. Method: H-index values are compared with Thomson ISI 5-year impact factors and expert opinion. Results: As hypothesized, the h-index correlates highly with ISI 5-year impact fa...
Data
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Ghostwriting policies by academic medical center - Raw data file in PDF format. (0.09 MB PDF)
Data
Ghostwriting policies by academic medical center - Raw data file in Microsoft Excel format. (0.07 MB XLS)
Article
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Medical ghostwriting, the practice of pharmaceutical companies secretly authoring journal articles published under the byline of academic researchers, is a troubling phenomenon because it is dangerous to public health
Conference Paper
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Background: The etiology of depression remains unknown, and the mechanism of action of antidepressant medication is poorly understood. However, through consumer advertising, pharmaceutical companies have consistently promoted the claim that depression is caused by a known neurotransmitter imbalance which is corrected through use of antidepressant m...
Conference Paper
Background: The etiology of depression remains unknown, and the mechanism of action of antidepressant medication is poorly understood. However, through consumer advertising, pharmaceutical companies have consistently promoted the claim that depression is caused by a known neurotransmitter imbalance which is corrected through use of antidepressant m...
Article
Full-text available
The prescription of psychotropic medications for children continues to be a controversial area of medical practice. In the United States, academic medical centers, medical researchers, prescribers, and the FDA are all ostensibly committed to the common goal of disseminating accurate information and promoting treatment based on scientific evidence....
Article
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To the Editor: Dr Robinson and colleagues¹ reported that poststroke patients randomized to either escitalopram or problem-solving therapy had a lower annual incidence of depression compared with those prescribed placebo. Although the authors discussed the finding that both treatments outperformed placebo, they did not make a direct statistical comp...
Article
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The cause of mental disorders such as depression remains unknown. However, the idea that neurotransmitter imbalances cause depression is vigorously promoted by pharmaceutical companies and the psychiatric profession at large. We examine media reports referring to this chemical imbalance theory and ask reporters for evidence supporting their claims....
Article
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David Healy raises intriguing questions regarding the rapid increase in bipolar diagnoses and the use of “mood stabilizing” medications [1]. Although this phenomenon is multifactorial, surely consumer advertising has played a role. A widely disseminated advertising campaign for aripiprazole (Abilify) claimed that it worked in the brain “like a ther...
Article
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Article
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Many ads for SSRI antidepressants claim that the drugs boost brain serotonin levels. Lacasse and Leo argue there is little scientific evidence to support this claim.
Article
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In the United States, antidepressant medications are heavily promoted through direct-to-consumer advertising, which is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Advertisements for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors frequently contain information inconsistent with the scientific evidence on the treatment of depression with antidepres...
Article
Full-text available
In this pilot study, concept mapping, a methodological approach combining qualitative and quantitative analytic strategies, was used to identify the therapist qualities, competencies, and skills necessary for effective play therapy outcomes as perceived by a sub-sample of 28 experienced play therapists who are members of the Association for Play Th...
Article
Full-text available
In this pilot study, concept mapping, a methodological approach combining qualitative and quantitative analytic strategies, was used to identify the therapist qualities, competencies, and skills necessary for effective play therapy outcomes as perceived by a sub-sample of 28 experienced play therapists who are members of the Association for Play Th...
Article
Full-text available
In this pilot study, concept mapping, a methodological approach combining qualitative and quantitative analytic strategies, was used to identify the therapist qualities, competencies, and skills necessary for effective play therapy outcomes as perceived by a sub-sample of 28 experienced play therapists who are members of the Association for Play Th...
Article
Full-text available
A sample of 71 psychopathology course syllabi from 58 different graduate schools of social work was analyzed to determine whether different viewpoints and the concomitant empirical evidence were presented regarding 4 significant mental health topics: concepts of mental disorder, reliability and validity of psychiatric diagnoses, biological etiology...
Article
Full-text available
Explored the various characteristics and attributes of a sample of play therapists ( N=891). The data were collected using multiple methods, including a web-based survey, to collect information from the membership of the Association for Play Therapy (APT). The survey instrument collected information on various issues such as members' educational ba...

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