Of the challenges facing health care professionals, none are greater than the problems presented by the young person with a substance use disorder. Addicted youths often have troubling family histories of alcoholism and other addictions that create great dysfunction and entirely unwholesome family environments. They enter treatment today with multiple problems, including severe learning disabilities, personality and thought disorders, and problems arising out of childhood abuse, molestation, and incest. In order to understand and treat adolescent addiction, it is crucial to understand adolescence itself. This includes learning about the development tasks faced by adolescents. It involves knowledge of the triggers for adolescent problems. It requires an understanding of addiction in general, and how addiction affects younger people (Davies, 1992).
Adolescence
There was a time, perhaps, when adolescence was a period of care-free and untroubled living, a period of maturation unencumbered by significant danger. Expectations, rules, and guidelines were clear; parents were a protective shield from—not a source of—stress, conflict, and harm. Whether this time ever existed, or if it is just a fantasy of what could have been, it is certainly clear that childhood and adolescence today are complex and challenging experiences for both parents and youth. The image of the extended family that gathered together each Sunday for dinner, as idealized in Norman Rockwell's paintings, has been all but displaced by single-parent families, fast food, crack cocaine, and MTV (Fendrich, Wislar, Johnson, & Hubbell, 2003).
Even in altogether healthy family environments where there is no drug abuse and addiction problems, adolescence can be a chaotic and tumultuous process. And indeed it is a process, a period of transition from childhood to adulthood. Adolescence can be a period of turmoil, conflict, and confusion. It may be only partially in jest that frenzied parents and health care professionals sometimes.........
