Substance Abuse and Severe Mental Health Problems

Dr. Kelley is a Professor in the Department of Psychology, School of Behavioral Sciences at Liberty University.  He is and has been actively involved in the local church including serving in a variety of roles including adult Sunday school teacher, Youth Director/teacher, Vacation Bible School Leader, and guest preacher.  He has been involved in national and international missions including work in Haiti and Hattian refugees resettled in Florida, as well as missions, work in Ukraine.  He also served on the board of a local Christian school where he also volunteered as a science teacher among other roles.  Dr. Kelley’s Christian faith is foundational and integral to his work in psychology, science, and public health.  To that end, Dr. Kelley has combined his love of Christ with his passion for helping those dealing with substance abuse to create the only academic resource on substance abuse written from a Christian worldview complete with Biblical integration throughout.  People of faith are well positioned to help those dealing with this issue and it is Dr. Kelley’s hope and prayer that this comprehensive textbook can be a transformational resource.

While Dr. Kelley’s core academic interests are in Psychology, Public Mental Health, Applied Research, Neuroscience, and Pharmacology/Toxicology, he has taken a very interdisciplinary approach to his studies and research.  Briefly, while in graduate school, he took courses from a number of departments at the Medical College of Virginia including Pharmacology and Toxicology, Physiology, Anatomy, and Neuroscience, as well as courses from the Developmental, Cognitive, and Clinical Psychology programs at Virginia Commonwealth University.  During his postdoctoral studies, at the Medical University of South Carolina (Departments of Psychiatry and Neurology), he participated in research projects as diverse as HIV-related dementia complex, developing/testing novel pharmacotherapies for alcoholism and tobacco dependence, to examining adult subjects with prenatal cocaine exposure. His trajectory of work in the field has taken him from bench to bedside to the community prevention efforts with a focus on high-impact program/interventions.  Dr. Kelley has delivered well over 100 invited presentations and has done a variety of work/training on this topic across most of the United States and several other countries (e.g., Haiti and Ukraine)  He is widely published and an award-winning scientist/scholar but grounds his work on what can be done to improve the lives of people struggling with substance abuse. This was a topic of interest to him having grown up in Washington D.C. at the height of our nation’s substance abuse problem so the topic is not purely academic but evolved from seeing firsthand the immediate and long-term impact of drugs on friends, schools, and the community. Having such a diverse lived, academic, and professional background, spanning areas that range from molecular biology to community-wide prevention programs, has provided him with many unique opportunities to collaborate on a variety of projects with a diverse group of scientists, clinicians, and community leaders.  It has also given him the necessary background to pursue research and scholarship that are clinically and socially relevant.  Finally, it has enabled him to assimilate and integrate information from different disciplines and has proven to be very advantageous in his research, teaching, and writing as well as in my ability to disseminate information and interact productively with a diverse group of professionals and community members.  Dr. Kelley hopes the culmination of these experiences translates into an authentic and impactful approach to addressing one of our nation’s most profound problems: substance abuse.