Substance abuse is, and has always been, an indisputable fact of life. People - especially young people - abuse various legal and illegal substances for any number of reasons: to intensify feelings, to achieve deeper consciousness, to escape reality, to self-medicate. And as substance-abusing teenagers mature, they pose particular challenges to the professionals charged with keeping them clean and sober and helping them maintain recovery into adulthood.

Adolescent Substance Abuse: Evidence-Based Approaches to Prevention and Treatment offers clear, interdisciplinary guidance that grounds readers in the many contexts - developmental, genetic, social, and familial among them - crucial to creating effective interventions and prevention methods. Its contributors examine current findings regarding popularly used therapies, including psychopharmacology, residential treatment, school- and community-based programs, group homes, and specific forms of individual, family, and group therapy.

Accessible to a wide professional audience, this volume: (1) Presents evidence-based support for the treatment decision-making process by identifying interventions that work, might work, and don't work. (2) Identifies individual traits associated with susceptibility to substance abuse and addiction in youth. (3) Provides a biogenetic model of the effects of drugs on the brain (and refines the concept of gateway drugs). (4) Evaluates the effectiveness of prevention programs in school and community settings. (5) Adds historical, spiritual, and legal perspectives on substance use and misuse. (6) Includes the bonus resource, the Community Prevention Handbook on Adolescent Substance Abuse and Treatment.

This volume is an all-in-one reference for counseling professionals and clinicians working with youth and families as well as program developers in state and local agencies and graduate students in counseling and prevention.

In today's rapidly changing world, new social and human service problems emerge constantly, and in order to make good use of resources that are often limited, social service agencies must ensure that their services are truly needed. Needs assessments provide a baseline against which later results can be compared, and may also assist policy-makers in recognizing new trends or problems on the horizon. With so much hinging on their outcome, these assessments must be conducted both accurately and efficiently, and this pocket guide will give practitioners the ability to do so.
Written by a group of social work scholars with a collective wealth of experience in conducting needs assessments at all levels, this practical guide will walk readers step by step through the process of selecting the right design to confidently conducting the assessment, meticulously analyzing data, and finally writing a cogent report. In addition, the authors explore the various approaches that can be used to assess the needs of a client or population group and the differences between large- and small-scale assessments. Later chapters in the book include discussions of emerging technologies in the field as well as abundant social work case examples.
Social work graduate students, as well as social workers in the field who need to brush up on their skills, will find this book an invaluable aid.

Research has consistently shown that there is a link between caregiver substance use and child maltreatment, but less attention has been given to child trauma exposure. The co-occurrence of caregiver substance misuse and child trauma exposure is a prevailing problem that has confounded social work prevention, protection, and treatment efforts with both children and adults for years. However, there has been minimal empirical and clinical literature focusing on child trauma as an outcome of caregiver substance use. This work is designed to be the catalyst for sustained intellectual inquiry about how caregiver substance use, child maltreatment, and violence exposure can be understood in theory and practice. To this end, the research presented in this book highlights the state of the science, the impact of the phenomenon, and the policy and practice questions that must be addressed. Implications for social work practice are highlighted in order to attenuate these deleterious and pervasive problems in the future. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Social Work Practice in the Addictions.