Troubled Teens Resources

The first and foremost objective of effective teen crisis intervention is prevention. The best weapon in the prevention arsenal is information. Teen Transitions accomplishes both by disseminating information to adolescents in transition from middle school to high school. Given that data suggests that kids start using drugs and drinking as early as middle school, they might have to move this program back to elementary school.

Troubled teens grow right in front of your eyes. They had no more intention of becoming classified as troubled than their parents had expectations that they would become trouble. The earlier a teen learns the power of choice in forming their lives, the better chance that teen has of steering clear of destructive behavior.

It is continually repeated in reports on juveniles that they actually do value what a parent advises, even if they appear to dismiss it. Helping a teen to understand the nature of drugs, alcohol and addiction provides him viable defenses against peer pressure. Making it clear to the teen how absolutely adamant you are that they never use gives them the stability and assurance of clear boundaries, even if they moan and groan about the restraints.

“Entering high school can be an exciting but challenging time for teenagers and their parents,” said Heather Fortin, a social worker at the high school. “The goal of Transitions 2007 is to bring parents and teens together to focus on important issues, increase awareness of what teens may be facing today, and ultimately open the door to future discussions in the home.”
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Teen crisis intervention campaigns directed at college students try to educate both parents and students about the dangers of taking drugs prescribed for Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder recreationally. Unfortunately, Adderall has taken it’s place next to Ritalin and Oxycontin as the favored prescription that college teens abuse.

“Most popularly, Adderall has become a cheap fix for millions of college students and various other young adult professionals with places to go and people to see.”

Unfortunately these teens also combine Adderrall with alcohol, the combination allowing them to be drunkenly alert, one supposes. It seems to produce a high that they relish and the dangers inherent in mixing drugs are, as usual, ignored.

“Adderall is also used by those who want to stay up all night partying and don’t feel that they can do it of their own volition. This provides for a most dangerous combination: Adderall, a stimulant, and alcohol, a depressant, do not mix well. The medication provides a feeling of mental clarity and alertness that one does not necessarily have in actuality after imbibing for hours. This means that you don’t feel as drunk as you actually are, and that you wake up with a hangover from the depths of hell, spit straight out of Persephone’s lair, if you can manage to fall asleep in the first place (and wake up afterward).”

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And then you crash. Crashing is the term used for the experience of “coming down” off a drug. It is usually what triggers a search for more because it is extremely unpleasant. And that is one of the many ways addiction begins.

One area of teen crisis intervention is depression. Teenage depression, and depression in general, is reported as being on the rise. Some claim that that increase actually represents more depression being reported since the stigma attached to it has lessened.

Actual depression, in and of itself, is indeed a frightening and enervating experience for those who have it and those who live with them. But there is concern that it may be over-prescribed for, with perfectly healthy people deciding that their occasional, and quite normal, bout of the blues needs medicating.

The seriousness of depression was very clear to me when talking with a friend raising a teenage girl. In a girls boarding school since her freshman year, her father’s financial reversals brought her home. Finishing her senior year away from her friends threw her into a suicidal spin that her mother fears daily will be repeated.

Check with your trusted physicians as well as mental health specialists if you have concerns about your teen possibly being depressed. An article in Science Daily goes over basic information.

“Classic severe depression is fairly easy to recognize. However, there exist milder forms and variant forms that are less easy to recognize…

Depression generally presents as a persistent (more than 2 weeks) decrease in enthusiasm, motivation, energy, concentration, and enjoyment. It also can lead to sleep or appetite disturbance and feelings of worthlessness or guilt. Additionally, depression generally causes an individual to experience more medical problems and to be more susceptible to physical illness, including death.

Depression is NOT normal feelings of sadness, which ebb and flow according to situational factors.”

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One type of teen crisis intervention that continues to be hotly debated is random drug testing conducted in our nation’s schools. Even parents who are well aware of the dangers that teen drug abuse represents for their teenagers are concerned about, not only civil rights issues, but the continued intrusion into the family by the state through the schools.

“Joe Newcomb, founder of Drug-Free Clubs of America, has seen many things in his lifelong career as a Cincinnati firefighter.

But the worst of all is seeing the lifeless body of a young person who has overdosed, he said at an information meeting for parents Sept. 12 at Edgewood High School.

Randomly drug testing high school students is just the latest — and perhaps most controversial — in a long line of steps to curb teen drug use at Edgewood High School.

Just two weeks from the first round of random drug testing, debate on online communities in Trenton, such as trentontalk.com, have generated several pages worth of discussion on random drug testing.”

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In the case of this Ohio community, the schools only intend to test those kids who are enrolled in extracurricular activities, though some towns have pondered random testing across the entire student population.

There are many questions that need to be sorted out and time will tell if drug testing is a good deterrent or if determined teen drug users will find a way around it.

Fathers who place their daughters in teen boarding schools are performing a painful, but necessary teen crisis intervention - not abandoning them, not betraying them. Yet fathers are particularly besieged with guilt when their daughters behavior leads them to place her in a boarding school for troubled teens. Fathers see their role as one of protector and provider. How could they have let their little girl down? How does a father handle dealing with a daughter who is trapped in addiction?

A site dedicated to exploring the relationships between fathers and daughters offers an account of one father’s experience.

“My daughter was in chemical dependency treatment last year and the hardest thing was to fight my urge to go in there and rescue her. Everyone told me that the best thing for her was to have her face the consequences of what she was doing. I knew that in my head, but it was really hard to do. I really needed support from other parents, especially one or two other dads, but boy, that was really hard to ask for, too.

She’s getting better, but still struggling – I mean, she’s only a kid. But I’m starting to see that sometimes the pain’s a real tool. It helps her see how serious this is and gets her moving to do what she needs to do to get better. That’s really hard to watch because she’s my little girl and Daddy’s supposed to be her protector. I know in my head that protecting her from the hurt or from the consequences, in a way, protects her from getting better. But, damn, that’s hard to let her hurt. It’s harder than going through all the chaos she put us through when she was drinking.”

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The most powerful form of teen crisis intervention is when a former addict uses their life as a testimony to the power of choice and the possibility for change. In terms of intervention in the lives of those troubled teenagers that are caught up in gangs, it is extremely effective for them to hear from one of their own who succeeded in escaping gang life. Leaving drugs and crime is one thing. Leaving a gang is another proposition.

“…eventually the life of a gang member wore on him. And on his family. He tried leaving the gang, but leaving a gang is like leaving a cult, Lilly said. The members are brainwashed. One night, men jumped him and beat him for trying to leave.

“I had a blood clot in my head from the beating,” said Lilly, now 31. “My eyes were so swollen I couldn’t see.”

Through the beating and other incidents, Lilly saw his mother Janet’s disappointment.

“She came to the hospital every day crying,” Lilly said. “And she left every day crying. I realized I had to make a change. It’s a terrible thing to shatter a mother’s dreams.”

Lilly returned to running, an early passion in life. He did it minus the use of one leg, an old gang shooting had deprived him of his other one. He has gone on to become a world class athlete.

“Lilly is now a professional wheelchair racer and motivational speaker. He speaks to kids about the importance of choices.

“I tell them life is about what kinds of choices you make, and how your choices will affect you for the rest of your life,” Lilly said before the race began in Fairbanks last Friday. “I’m a living example of that.”

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Teen crisis intervention is usually not the purview of United Way. Long recognized for their work with the poor and homeless, the only contact they generally have with troubled teenagers is in that context. However, so impressed were they with the community’s concerns about drug addiction that they want to tackle that too.

“Brian Sipe, board president of the UWA, announced earlier this week that the organization would solicit proposals from nonprofit, governmental, educational and law enforcement agencies interested in garnering support for initiatives geared toward having a positive impact on substance abuse issues in Aroostook.
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The UWA’s decision to gather the proposals comes on the heels of findings received from the organization’s first-ever communitywide assessment project… Substance abuse was tagged as a major worry for community members, according to the assessment. Respondents expressed anxiety about the toll drug abuse and addiction has taken on communities. They also feared newer, more dangerous drugs eventually would arrive…
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“Everywhere we went, from the southernmost tip of Aroostook to the northernmost tip, we heard concerns about substance abuse,” Stevens, the executive director of the UWA, said Wednesday. “As a board, we read through the community assessment and we realized that there is a great deal of concern about this issue, but it is not something that we are really putting a lot of money into as an agency at this point.”

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Teen crisis intervention is hard to implement in a community where parents and citizens tend to be in denial. Wealthier communities may have a particularly hard time understanding that drugs and drug problems are no longer confined to certain demographics. Troubled teenagers come from both sides of the track.

And what is true in America is apparently also true in Great Britain. One mother, desperate for her son’s life, lashes back at her wealthy neighbors for failing to take the problem seriously.

“One local mother says it’s time for parents to wake up and realize all youths are at risk of becoming drug addicts.

Peggy Strife, who lives in a $400,000 home in a good neighbourhood, has been grappling with her 20-year-old son Brad’s crystal meth addiction for the past several years.

“I’m waiting for him to die,” said Strife about her son…Strife and her spouse lived through their own period of denial about what drugs were doing to Brad. She doesn’t want to see anyone else ignore the problem.

Strife disapproves of recent letters to the editor in the Herald where people have expressed opposition to building a youth treatment centre here.

“We have a high drug rate here and people don’t want to admit it,” Strife said.

When Strife was cruising the streets with a baseball bat, attempting to stop her son from finding and using meth, she rarely tracked down her son in areas like the West Flat, which she says tend to be associated with substance abuse issues.

“A lot of the houses I was at were on the East and West hills,” said Strife. She estimated that there were six youth drug dealers within a five-block radius of her upper-class home.

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Teen crisis intervention may amount to doing nothing at all. As we have all seen, a teenager hell bent on destroying their life does not take kindly to criticism or advice. Be it a teenager or an adult, an addict who hasn’t hit bottom yet is likely to keep on using until they do.

The troubled teenager who wrote the following seems to recognize the importance of consequences, even though he has yet to
hit bottom, he seems to understand that will be the only lesson he’ll understand.

“Don’t let your love and anxiety for me lead you into doing what I ought to do for myself….

Don’t accept my promises, I’ll promise anything to get off the hook. But the nature of my illness prevents me from keeping promises, even though I mean them at the time.

Don’t make empty threats. Once you have made a decision, stick to it.

Don’t believe everything I tell you, it may be a lie. Denial of reality is a symptom of my illness. Moreover, I’m likely to lose respect for those I can fool too easily.

Don’t let me take advantage of you or exploit you in any way. Love cannot exist for long without the dimension of justice.

Don’t cover up for me or try in any way to spare me the consequences of my drinking and using. Don’t lie for me, pay my bills, or meet my obligations. It may avert or reduce the very crisis that would prompt me to seek help. I can continue to deny that I have a drinking and using problem as long as you provide an automatic escape from the consequences of my drinking/using.”

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Very frequently those who work in some form of teen crisis intervention come away from their experiences working with troubled teens with quite a few uplifting moments and stories.

Such is the case with one individual efforts to reach gang members. The result was a harmony of voices where once there was only discord. The most effective teen help there is, is the guidance that leads a teenager to successfully exploit and profit from their owns gifts, talents and skills.

“Three folk and blues musicians walked into a juvenile detention center full of young felons last year, armed with nothing but guitars and a repertoire they feared the teens would shout down.
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The musicians were there to help the teens write a song.

Their song.

In their voices.

Voices that - until that moment - were lost in a cyclone of drug abuse, sexual abuse and crime that had defined their lives.

Ball, a syndicated humor columnist… first entered the W.J. Maxey Boys Training School in Green Oak Township in 2005.

He went in with a plan to crack open the tough shells of some young felons with a creative writing program. He came out, courtesy of a grant from the Michigan Humanities Council, with a 15-minute DVD showcasing an insightful young poet.

That success compelled Ball, a former Chicago garage band guitarist, to bring the roots musicians to Maxey Boys and the Adrian Training School for girls.

In the spring of 2006, they went in with a plan to expose the teens to roots music. They came out with Lost Voices, a new nonprofit.”

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