Heads Up, a Harm Reduction Approach to Problematic Drinking Prevention and Intervention

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.