Recent bulletins from the Findings drug and alcohol bank:
UK trial tests personality-based approach to preventing drinking
Positive and persistent effects on the drinking outcomes of high-risk London pupils suggests they may have benefited from this psychosocial intervention over standard drug education – but was the novel strategy of matching the intervention to the pupils’ personality the active ingredient?
Prison therapeutic community no better than counselling
For the first time in a prison setting, a randomised trial has rigorously compared intensive residential therapeutic community treatment to outpatient counselling. Confounding expectations, the US prison for problem drug users which hosted the study gained no recidivism dividend by allocating even high-risk prisoners to intensive treatment. Results of this unique trial may warrant a rethink of official US and UK guidance.
Intervene beyond the family to help young problem substance users
Review finds that multidimensional family therapy, which intervenes across a child’s social environment, is more effective than other interventions for treating young people with substance use and other behavioural problems, particularly those further along the severity scale.
As part of the alcohol treatment matrix:
Managing coerced alcohol treatment
Key studies on the role of management in the treatment of problem drinking in criminal justice settings and/or to safeguard the community. Just as for practitioners, for managers the challenge is to extract therapeutic benefit out of a coercive, punishment-oriented context. Discusses a rare trial of the influential ‘risk-need-responsivity’ model, asks whether cognitive-behavioural approaches are the way to go, and identifies possibly the most difficult management task in the addictions.
Organisational functioning and alcohol treatment in the criminal justice system
This cell explores the influence of an organisation’s structures and processes on how well it delivers treatment for drinking problems in criminal justice and allied settings. In the context of a market which drives treatment organisations to grow ever bigger, on the basis of US research we ask, ‘Is small beautiful?’, and explore how an organisation’s control responsibilities might undermine the quality of the therapeutic contacts it is able to impose on offenders.
Treatment systems to cut alcohol-related crime and safeguard the community
An Australian review argues that despite radically different starting points, criminal justice and treatment systems must collaborate to deliver treatment. We invite you to measure your own systems against its key ingredients for collaboration, and to ask yourself how far collaboration should go: do ‘shared goals’ in practice become those of the criminal justice system? Ponder too why drinking is so prominent in sending thousands to prison, yet not in the services provided there.
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