Four Years After

Abstract

Four years have passed since we have begun our editorial journey under the name of the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction (IJMA), and amazingly we have come a long way. Thanks to our dedicated reviewers, the backbone of the journal, and the supportive editorial advisory board members who made this journey possible. Throughout this process, we have accomplished much success. We have established a fruitful affiliation with both the department of Behavioral Medicine and Psychiatry at West Virginia University and the National Institute for Public Health and Mental Health Research at Auckland University of Technology. We have increased our annual production from two to four issues and published in both online and print formats. We have increased our readership pool exponentially and have become an academic reference in most university libraries. Finally, we joined the International Society of Addiction Journal Editors (ISAJE) where we follow its well-established peer-review process. IJMA has become a portal for investigators to address myriad of social concerns ranging from ethical and philosophical questions of research methodologies (Borrell & Boulet, 2005) to the examination of behaviour on a molecular level such as expression of neurotrophin system in suicide cases (Strauss, De Luca, George, & Kennedy, 2006). Articles published in this issue of IJMA echo the same level and quality of concern. In this issue our esteemed authors examine interesting and thought provoking subject matters ranging from social marketing campaign in the area of prevention to a case study of binge gambling. First of our articles for this issue is authored by an exceptional research team at McGill University in Canada. In this article, Messerlian et al. critically discuss current social marketing campaigns that target youth as related to drug, alcohol and tobacco use. In his thought provoking article, Doughney from Victoria University in Australia questions the current practices of Electronic Gaming Machines (EGM) operation in the state of Victoria by drawing our attention to the harmful impact of poker machines. Int J Ment Health Addiction (2006) 4: 283–284 DOI 10.1007/s11469-006-9045-5