Cash for change; contingency management as reward or intervention

Even though the history of CM in treatment and research of SUD is fairly long and has been extended to different types of substances outside the original alchol use disorder, it has only recently expanded in to the treatment of other psychiatric disorders. CM applyed as a treatment model in research has during the last 10 years brought about studies and trials in fields far beyond SUD. CM seems to be an intervention that with increasingly popularity targets many different types of treatments in a variety of situations; ”illnesses/disorders” such as eating disorder, smoking, cronic pain, obesity, post-traumatic stress disorder, anorexia nervosa but also certain population groups in problematic life situations such as young people who are homeless or students with disabilities but, finally, it has also been tested as an intervention working towards a second to the participant dependent population, in this case when there has been reports of child neglect (Donahue et al. 2017; Lester et al. 2007; Reichle et al. 2013; Tzilos et al., 2009; Wolf et al. 1968; Ziser et al. 2018).

In most of, maybe even all, of these studies CM is introduced and presented as an evidence-based intervention which in the medical hierarchical system of classifying evidence
would be (is) rated as top-level, level 1 based on results from systematic reviews and meta-analyses (Evidence-Based Medicine Working Group 1992). One example of the rating of evidence speaking in favour of CM is the National Registry of Evidence-Based Programs and Practices (NREPP) in the US where the method has several listings (https://www.samhsa.gov/nrepp).