What factors help or inhibit interventions addressed towards adolescents who are abusing drugs?

Abstract

This research looked at various factors (e.g. personality-based, psychological, social and environmental) related to drug use during adolescence and how these factors contributed, either positively or negatively on their cessation or modification of such abuse. For the purpose of this research, adolescence is considered to be the period in one’s life between the ages of 10 and 19 years. This age bracket is consistent with the World Health Organisation’s definition of adolescence (WHO, n.d.). Various studies and research, amongst which the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) is a prominent one, show that adolescence and young adulthood are crucial points in life at which “people are most likely to start using drugs”. Drug addiction is also very likely to leave strong roots in the early teens, with a high chance that it would develop further during adulthood (NIDA, January 2014). Various themes and intriguing aspects emerged through interviews that were conducted with service providers and service users. Upon analysing the generated data, parental influence and peer influence were the two most occurring themes. Throughout the whole study one will notice positive and negative connotations of both themes and how these effect the adolescent drug user. It was noticed that most of the time peer influence has a negative influence on adolescents because it occurs to be both the trigger for the onset and relapse of adolescents into taking drugs. On the other hand parental influence mostly was associated with more positive aspects like, being a good source of support for adolescents, can act as part of the prevention and can teach adolescents about drugs and guide them in the right way. Nevertheless, there still were some negative aspects which emerged about parental influence. For instance, where there was a negative relationship between parents and adolescents, there was a higher risk and chance that adolescents would start using drugs. This study goes on to analyse how current services accommodate and the ongoing need to increase services targeted to and specified for adolescents who make use of drugs. Finally, this study concludes with recommendations for raising future awareness about the needs of adolescents and also how to improve local services in order to attract more adolescents to recovery services.