A Description Of An Adolescent Drug Treatment

Dr. Purushothaman
November 28, 2013

Seeking the assistance of adolescent drug treatments will help you ease the worries of knowing your teenager has engaged in drug abuse. Of course, enrolling your teenage son or daughter in a drug rehabilitation program is not enough. You have to give your full support and provide new understanding for them.

Being hooked to illegal drugs and other substance abuse is not an easy fact to handle. The person involved in the addiction has distorted perspective of perceiving things and harboring emotions. For them, the illegal drugs are their salvation. And if you put them in an adolescent drug treatment, they view you as their enemy.

Thus, it is important that you maintain constant communications with them. You may have to extend your patience longer than what you already have. This may include paying regular visits to them in their treatment facilities and expressing your emotions of how much you love them.

You will also need to reach out to their level of understanding so they would clearly see the reasons why you and your beloved half are doing this to him or her. Now, part of the treatment program is the drug abuse counseling.

The drug abuse counseling is a program that helps the participants to go through the process of healing. This is not easy to achieve as it involves weeks, and sometimes months in other cases. During this counseling, the participant will be helped in undergoing phases of treatment.

The treatment may not be successfully achieved, if the involved adolescent has not acknowledged the truth of his or her addiction. So, acknowledgement is the first step. It is followed by wanting to get free of the drug addiction. Then, comes the acceptance of the treatment.

During the counseling, the participant's parents or friends may be called in for statement or testimony. This helps the patient realize how serious his or her addiction is, and how much pain it has caused her or his family.

In some cases, the patient may not have fully mended the relationship with his or her family. So, during the first few sessions of the counseling, the patient will speak harshly of her or his family and friends, and may ignore or even deny the testimonies given by family or friends.

There are also four different phases of the counseling to help patients recover and be deemed as cured. The first phase is the engagement and stabilization, in which patients are convinced, motivated and involuntarily committed to treatment. Its goal is to stabilize the acute symptoms of the drug use disorder.

The second phase is the early recovery. It is the phase in which the patient learns to cope with desires to use the illegal drugs, and avoids people, places and things that represent high-risk addiction relapse factors.

The third phase is the middle recovery. This phase continues to work on the issues from the earlier phase as needed. Patients will learn to develop coping skills or develop such skills in dealing with intrapersonal and interpersonal issues.

The final stage is the late recovery. Also called the maintenance phase, the patient undergoing adolescent drug treatment will have to continue working on the issues addressed in the middle phase of recovery, and work on other clinical problems that may come up.

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