Danielle Nadorff Awarded SAMHSA Grant to Train Rural Mississippians in Overdose Reversal
Danielle K. Nadorff, Ph.D., Associate Professor in the Mississippi State University Department of Psychology, has been awarded a four-year grant from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration to train first responders and community members across 20 rural Mississippi counties to recognize and reverse opioid overdoses. The award provides $783,338 in its first year and approximately $3.2 million over four years.
The project, SAFE RESPONSE MS, comes to Mississippi State through SAMHSA's First Responders Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act program, administered by the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment. Dr. Nadorff serves as Project Director.
Over the four years, the project will train at least 5,000 firefighters, law enforcement officers, EMS personnel, and other community members, and will distribute free naloxone kits so that the people who complete the training carry the medication with them. A peer recovery support specialist will then follow up with overdose survivors and their families to connect them with treatment and other services. The project also maps what resources each county already has, working with local partners in all 20 counties, in order to point people toward help available nearby.
The 20 counties are home to more than 600,000 Mississippians, and all 20 are federally designated mental health professional shortage areas, which means residents with substance use and co-occurring mental health conditions often have no local treatment option.
The grant builds on Dr. Nadorff's work leading Mississippi's first comprehensive behavioral health needs assessment, conducted by Mississippi State in partnership with the Mississippi Department of Mental Health and funded through the state's opioid settlement resources. Initial findings from that assessment, prepared with Katerina Sergi, Ph.D., and Sujan Anreddy, Ph.D., of the Social Science Research Center, are published by the Department of Mental Health as Mississippi's Overdose Crisis: What the Data Show (https://www.dmh.ms.gov/mississippis-overdose-crisis-what-the-data-show/). That analysis found that overdose deaths statewide have fallen 39.8% from their 2021 peak, outpacing the national decline of 36.2%, while 81 of Mississippi's 82 counties remain federally designated mental health shortage areas and several counties have continued to rise even as the state has improved. SAFE RESPONSE MS acts on those findings in 20 of the counties where local treatment capacity is the most scarce.
The project team includes Co-Project Directors Michael R. Nadorff, Ph.D., Emily S. H. Stafford, Ph.D., Ty W. D. Stafford, Ph.D., and Anna Grace Tribble, Ph.D.; Co-Investigator Aggie Rieger, Ph.D.; and Evaluator Samuel T. Murphy, Ph.D. Training will be delivered through regional hubs in the Delta, East Central, and Northeast areas of the state, and the project will support a doctoral graduate assistant in the Department of Psychology.