person family treatment

Not all youngsters are lucky enough to have families who are willing or able to engage in conjoint family treatment. Unfortunately, individual supportive or exploratory psychotherapy is of little benefit for adolescent substance abusers and in some instances these types of intervention may exacerbate drug abuse by helping the adolescent find historical reasons to account for his or her current problems. An alternative to traditional individual approaches is one-person family treatment (Szapocznik & Kurtines, 1989). In one-person family treatment, during the engagement phase, the psychologist identifies the part of the client that wants to recover and develops an alliance with that part. Treatment goals and a time-frame for the treatment contract is agreed. Then, to clarify the patterns of interaction in which the drug-related behaviours are embedded, the psychologist invites the adolescent to describe the roles other family members take with respect to him or her when he or she engages in drug-related behaviour. When the psychologist has a good idea of what these behaviours are, he or she can role-play one or more family members and check out how the adolescent responds to the mother, father, siblings and so forth, and which aspects of their behaviour is maintaining the drug-using behaviour. This will yield a fairly accurate description of the pattern of interaction around the presenting problem.