Abuse Intervention

In recent decades, an increase in the amount and frequency of alcohol and illicit drug consumption has been observed among Mexican adolescents. Brief intervention programs effectively reduce substance use and abuse in various populations. To determine the persuasiveness of the Brief Intervention Program for Adolescents who Begin the Abusive Substancrs of Alcohol and Other Drugs (PIBA) and the maintenance of the change in the young people who attended.

Alcohol Consumption

Play Video

When comparing pre-intervention vs. During the follow-up, it was found that the adolescents who participated in the PIBA maintained a reduction in their consumption pattern (amount, frequency, and abstinence time) of alcohol, marijuana, and inhalants; problems associated with consumption decreased; and increased their level of perceived self-efficacy.

The improvement was greater in those who completed the brief intervention than in those who did not complete all the sessions.

Substance Abuse Intervention

The use of psychoactive substances modifies young people’s physical, mental, and behavioral capacities. Each Drug causes specific reactions in the psyche and the organism; consumers seek it for its pleasurable effects or to lessen unpleasant feelings.

social consequences

However, its abuse carries a potential for short- and long-term damage and negative psychological and social consequences in the lives of consumers and their families.

cognitive-behavioral

Brief interventions are cognitive-behavioral psychological therapies of short duration and high effectiveness, with low costs and favorable results in clinical practice.

addictive behaviors

The cognitive-behavioral approach considers that addictive behaviors are over-learned habits that can be modified through self-control techniques.

Self-efficacy

Self-efficacy plays a relevant role in the initiation of drug use, the course of treatment, the maintenance of abstinence, and the prevention of relapses.

Brief interventions based on social learning theory, which also use components of motivational interviewing, relapse prevention, and self-management techniques, have been shown at the international and national levels to be effective for people with problematic drinking patterns who have not yet developed dependence.

Self-efficacy expectations refer to the individual’s beliefs about her ability to successfully face a situation; they are established, in part, by the individual’s repertoire of coping skills and by the assessment of relative effectiveness, concerning the specific demands of the situation.

Planning And Evaluation Of Treatments And Effective Drug Intervention

The results and conclusions derived from the monitoring can contribute to the plan and evaluation of treatments and effective intervention techniques and improve its main components. However, only some studies report follow-ups carried out after a year or more after the conclusion of the brief intervention. Due to the above, the objective of this study was to determine the efficacy of a brief intervention aimed at the adolescent population that begins to abuse alcohol and other drugs through the evaluation of the maintenance of change, carried out through follow-up.

Pre-intervention assessments and follow-ups were performed on each participant. The variables used to determine the program’s effectiveness were:

The amount of use.
Frequency per week.
Negative consequences associated with use.
Perceived self-efficacy in quitting substance use.

A novel aspect of the present study was that it allowed us to corroborate the positive results of the PIBA in a setting for training therapists at the master’s level: the Center for Prevention in Addictions of the Faculty of Psychology of the UNAM, whose mission is to promote the professional training of student and, in this way, have an impact on the field of drug use prevention.

The proposed hypothesis was that the adolescents who completed the brief intervention would maintain greater positive changes in the dependent variables evaluated, in contrast to those who dropped out of the brief intervention.

…

The problem of drug use, like any social problem, is susceptible to various epistemological interpretations. It is a complex and multifactorial social problem for its causes and consequences and its components and implications. In this way, it can be viewed from different perspectives, each emphasizing certain aspects and proposing a particular approximate position.

The multiple elements involved determine the complexity of aspects that must be considered to understand and address this social problem fully. All drug use implies the presence of a person who makes a behavioral choice. Still, it also supposes a peculiar reaction of the organism before the action of a chemical substance, as well as social scenarios with many conditioning variables. We discuss a phenomenon with multiple implications: psychological, medical, biochemical, sociological, ethnological, legal, economic, political, educational, historical, ethical…

This complexity should invite us to contemplate the drug use problem without any reductionism or partial interpretation. However, the specific training of the researchers and professionals who deal with it has created different interpretive models –sometimes formulated in an irreconcilable way, unfortunately– which, in any case, also provide interpretative richness, provided that the researcher can maintain away from the reductionism as mentioned above since this will prevent exploring all the implications of the phenomenon.

In general terms, we can distinguish nine major interpretative contributions that we will analyze separately in this article: legal model, consumption distribution model, traditional medical model, harm reduction model, social deprivation model, model of socio-structural factors, model health education, individualistic psychological model and socio-ecological model. The latter is presented with a certain vocation for synthesis since it intends to collect the other interpretations’ relevant findings and propose overcoming its shortcomings and limitations. In any case, the socio-ecological perspective comes fundamentally from the social sciences, and, despite the vocation mentioned above for integration and overcoming reductionism, its explanation can only be understood by attending to the contributions of the other models. For this reason, we will systematize the characteristics of the aforementioned theoretical interpretations in this work to present a vision as exhaustive as possible of the problem of drug use.

However, before fulfilling the main purpose of this work, it is necessary to establish some basic questions about the concepts we will deal with to delimit them conceptually.

We will start from the classic definition of a psychoactive drug provided by the World Health Organization (WHO), which is understood as any substance that, when introduced into the body, modifies any of the functions of the central nervous system (Kramer and Cameron, 1975). In other words, a psychoactive drug will be a chemical substance capable of affecting the psyche, regardless of its sociological classification.

The Concept Of The Sociological Situation Of Drug

The preceding leads us to consider the concept of the sociological situation of drugs in industrialized societies and to differentiate three possibilities (Berjano and Musitu, 1987):

Institutionalized Substances:

They maintain a status of controlled legality in their production, distribution, advertising, and consumption, in addition to receiving mostly uncritical evaluations from the social environment. This is the case with alcohol and tobacco.

Non-Institutionalized Substances:

They maintain a status of illegality in the indicated items and receive mostly critical evaluations from the social environment.

Institutionalized Substances With The Possibility Of “Diverted” Use:

Substances manufactured for medical purposes can be “diverted” from their original purpose to be consumed for recreational purposes.

The WHO highlights that tobacco and ethyl alcohols are the widely consumed psychoactive drugs in industrialized societies and those that are associated with the greatest public health problems, which is why they should not be separated from the generic consideration of drugs nor contemplated. to a lesser degree of harmfulness concerning non-institutionalized substances (World Health Organization, 2000).

It will also be necessary to differentiate concepts related to drug consumption levels and addiction. The term “use” refers to the ingestion of a substance by a person at a given time. It is, therefore, a generic concept and should be understood as such. Drug use will not always be addictive; the latter refers to a pattern of behavior definable in clinical terms, characterized by the prioritization of the consumption of a particular substance over other daily behaviors, by the appearance of withdrawal symptoms in the face of deprivation and by the impossibility of the person to control their consumption (American Psychiatric Association, 2002).

Addiction is not the only form of drug use related to health damage. Abusive consumption, even without necessarily being addictive, represents a type of health risk, both due to the morbidity associated with the toxicity of the substances and due to the interference that the psychoactive effect can exert on certain behaviors. Thus, it will be possible to differentiate between two forms of abusive consumption (Pons, 2007):

Quantitative abusive consumption: the consumption of a particular substance in an amount and frequency that exceeds the tolerable limits for maintaining the health of the consuming person.
Qualitative abusive use: using a particular substance associated with particular circumstances and regardless of frequency: driving, work use, child use, among others.

…

Category: Abuse Intervention

Brief Intervention For Adolescents Who Start Abusing Alcohol And Other Drugs