ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the therapist with general guidelines for conducting treatment with families of adolescent substance abusers from a structural-strategic orientation. For the sake of brevity, it aims to organize the most relevant publications on adolescent substance abuse and family therapy into the following three categories: family characteristics, family therapy approaches, and family research studies. Duncan Stanton and Thomas Todd have emphasized the importance of the “non-blaming message” in the recruitment of the families of drug abusers into treatment. Once the therapist has developed a good alliance with the adolescent substance abuser, the latter can be employed as a “diagnostic tour guide” of her family system. The guiding principle in data-gathering is to understand the interpersonal significance of the substance abuse. It is, therefore, important to obtain data that allows the development and testing of hypotheses concerning the role of substance abuse and factors that may maintain the abuse.
