Substance Abuse As a Human Worlwide Problem

 Harold Rosenberg, Kristine T. Philips (2003) in their article discuss about acceptability and availability of harm reduction interventions for drug abuse in American substance abuse treatment agencies. A quantitative empirical study was conducted on a sample of 500 random American substance abuse treatment agencies, with the use of multiple interventions: harm reduction education, cue exposure therapy, needle exchange, substitute opiate prescribing, various detoxification regimes and complementary therapies. Pharmacological interventions consisted of drug replacement therapy, opiate detoxification interventions and relapse and overdose prevention.

This study focused on acceptability, availability and non – availability of the tool/interventions that are used to prevent harm by the use of drugs (short-term methadone, self administered take-home opiate antagonist in case of overdose, needle exchange, education regarding harm reduction), to increase the detoxification (clonidine/lofexidine, acupuncture and massage) and to decrease the occurrence of relapse after detoxification (cue exposure therapy). The acceptability was found around 50% but the lack of availability in American substance abuse treatment agencies has been a drawback.

David K. Marcus, Deborah A. Kashy, Matthew B. Wintersteen, Guy S. Diamond in their article, discuss the therapeutic alliance in adolescent substance abuse treatment: A one – with – many ways, where 1 therapist deals with multiple clients. One with many (OWM) methods i.e. Kenny, Kashy and Cook’s method was used for the examination of therapeutic alliance. A quantitative empirical study was conducted on a sample of 398 adolescents by 14 therapists. On the basis of therapeutic alliance and social interaction, complicated outcomes were noted with different levels of measurement and components of alliance i.e. perceiver, partner or relationship that were gathered from informants (therapists and clients) in relation to different outcomes.The present as well as the previous OWM study describes that the relation between alliance and outcome may lead to more complicated results.

Aaron Hogue, Howard A. Liddle, Sarah Dauber, Jessica Samuolis in their articles, discuss about the linking session focus to treatment outcome in evidence based treatments for adolescent substance abuse. A quantitative empirical study was conducted on a sample of 51 adolescents of substance abuse along with their families by 12 therapists to deliver the treatment. The treatment included 2 empirically supported treatments i.e. individual cognitive-behavioral therapy and multidimensional family therapy. Adolescent focus and family focus were the 2 subscales that were identified by exploratory factor analysis. The resulted outcome revealed that family focus leads to improved posttreatment in drug use as compared to individual focus. This finding explains the primary causative factors for adolescents substance abuse i.e. family conflicts, parent-child detachment and deficient parenting skills.