Getting your child treatment for, say, cancer presents numerous challenges — but most of them don’t involve determining whether the therapies offered by major medical organizations are backed by data. Unfortunately, that’s exactly the predicament facing many parents seeking help for children with drug problems.
Because there is no “FDA” that regulates behavioral treatments, many drug programs have no research evidence for their effectiveness or even safety — and parents can be misled into placing their children into such rehabs. But a new website created by the Partnership at DrugFree.org (formerly the Partnership for a Drug Free America) could help.
It’s the first major effort to offer guidance to parents of teens with drug problems that focuses on the right care, versus any care, and the first to recognize that the wrong care can do harm.
The new site, Time To Get Help, has a free e-book called “Treatment,” which focuses specifically on finding the best help, as well as other resources to connect parents with one another for support.
“In general, it is an excellent resource for families,” says Nicki Bush, a clinical child psychologist and Robert Wood Johnson health and society scholar at the University of California, of the Partnership’s new treatment guide. “It emphasizes family involvement, appropriate assessment and the critical importance of appropriate training for treatment providers, including providing important warnings about harmful programs.” (More on TIME.com: Does Teen Rehab Cure Addiction or Create It?)
Because there is no “FDA” that regulates behavioral treatments, many drug programs have no research evidence for their effectiveness or even safety — and parents can be misled into placing their children into such rehabs. But a new website created by the Partnership at DrugFree.org (formerly the Partnership for a Drug Free America) could help.
It’s the first major effort to offer guidance to parents of teens with drug problems that focuses on the right care, versus any care, and the first to recognize that the wrong care can do harm.
The new site, Time To Get Help, has a free e-book called “Treatment,” which focuses specifically on finding the best help, as well as other resources to connect parents with one another for support.
“In general, it is an excellent resource for families,” says Nicki Bush, a clinical child psychologist and Robert Wood Johnson health and society scholar at the University of California, of the Partnership’s new treatment guide. “It emphasizes family involvement, appropriate assessment and the critical importance of appropriate training for treatment providers, including providing important warnings about harmful programs.” (More on TIME.com: Does Teen Rehab Cure Addiction or Create It?)
Early in her career, Bush says, she discovered that a teen residential program at which she worked was using “therapeutic” techniques that were harmful and abusive. Ever since, she has been a member of A START — the Alliance for Safe, Therapeutic and Appropriate Residential Treatment — which advocates for change.
Appropriate assessment of teen behavior is crucial because the line between normal and unhealthy behavior can be hard for parents to discern. Since many treatment programs focus on getting teens to accept that they have a drug problem, it’s important to determine first whether or not that is truly the case.
“Sometimes evaluation in a health setting is a bit like asking a barber if you need a haircut,” says Ken Winters, the director of the Center for Adolescent Substance Abuse Research at the Treatment Research Institute in Pennsylvania who helped create the guide.
It offers specific help in finding the best assessment, including information on standardized tools that can minimize the problem of overly inclusive measures. For instance, some programs still focus heavily on patients’ denial about being addicted — as proof of their addiction — and emphasize “confronting,” it despite research showing that this is counterproductive. Once someone is placed in treatment, then, anything they say can be seen as evidence of their problem.
Read Full Article Here: How to Find the Best Drug Treatment for Teens: A Guide for Parents
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