Engaging young people who misuse substances in treatment

The focus of this review is to examine service utilization, treatment effectiveness, and future directions for adolescents who misuse substances.

Although the effectiveness of treatments has improved in the last two decades, young people's utilization of services has remained relatively stable. This is disconcerting because early intervention improves outcomes and deterioration is associated with physical, psychological, and social problems. The requirement for coordinated service provision across a wide range of treatment agencies cannot be emphasized enough, because young substance misusers come to services with a variety of symptoms and problems. It is encouraging that, to date, treatment studies indicate that adolescents in almost all types of treatment reduce their use of substances. The greatest reductions are shown for family therapy, followed by cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), motivational enhancement therapy (MET)/CBT, MET behavior therapy, and pharmacological treatment. Despite the developing treatment literature, important methodological limitations restrict comparability between studies.

The requirement for holistic, systematic assessments should include adolescents' social contexts, trauma, and psychiatric and physical illnesses because they are the cornerstones to understanding engagement and retention. Our review shows the importance of coordinating primary healthcare, mental health, and substance abuse treatment facilities, and highlights networking between other providers as integral to providing an optimal response to this unpredictable, often marginalized, group.