MMI mental health questions on addiction and substance use

A physician meets mental illness and substance use in every clinic, and how they speak about it decides whether the patient comes back. MMI mental health questions put you beside a roommate, a brother, a cook or a stranger online who is in trouble, and ask what you'd do tonight.

What these questions test

Raters score whether you treat addiction and mental illness as health conditions rather than as character flaws, and whether that view changes what you do. They listen for safety first, which means acting tonight on a 16-year-old's alarming post in an online community or a line cook who arrives smelling of alcohol.

Harm reduction is an approach that lowers the harm of drug use, such as overdose and infection, without requiring the person to stop using. The supervised consumption site question asks whether you understand it well enough to defend it to a frightened neighborhood.

How to approach them

1. Put immediate safety first and act on it tonight. A public post about being done with everything is treated as a risk to life, which means reaching the person directly, asking plainly about their safety, and filing the platform's emergency report if you can't reach them.
2. Treat the condition as treatable and keep your role. You can be honest about what you've seen, stay present and connect the person to a crisis line, campus counseling or a physician. You can't be their treatment.
3. At work, apply the rule for the people it protects while advocating for the person. A restaurant's zero-tolerance policy exists for the customers and the staff around the grill, so you follow it when a cook arrives drunk and also ask the owner about treatment or a way back.
4. Decide in advance where confidentiality gives way. A 17-year-old buying a stimulant from a classmate and a roommate drinking alone have each asked you to keep quiet, and the MMI follow-up raises the stakes until you tell someone. Say what you'd need to see before you told a parent, and tell the person first.
5. For the policy prompts, define harm reduction and say what the evidence is meant to show. Treat a neighborhood's fear of a supervised consumption site and a university's liability after a student's crisis as real concerns that can be tested. Then vote, and name the safeguards, such as a path into treatment or a return-to-campus plan with support rather than a mandatory semester away.

Common mistakes

• Lending money or giving one more chance because you feel for the person, with no plan attached, enables the next loss.
• Moralizing about weakness or willpower tells the rater how you'd speak to a patient with a substance use disorder.
• Promising to keep quiet about a drug a minor is buying makes a promise you'll have to break.
• Ending without naming a resource, whether a crisis line, campus counseling or a physician, leaves the person where you found them.