internalizing disorders that are more common such as depression or generalized anxiety disorder, that type of thing. so that's important that you then have gender-specific treatment available as well and sometimes you want to do that in gender-specific groups. so that would be good and matching female counselors with girls in treatment. [overtalking]...some of the problems they may experience would have to do with sexual abuse, emotional abuse by... yes, victimization is one of the leading co-occurring conditions that we see especially in the public treatment programs that we've studied, it's a common...over 60 percent. and with some programs they can either be cognitive therapy, group therapy, individual... cognitive behavioral therapy is really a common therapy that you see that cuts across most of the evidence-based treatments. and so it's really a core therapy that helps people sort of reappraise how they think about things and how they evaluate things in their mind and

then that can lead to behavioral change from a re-evaluation. it's not so much the old, sort of if they get insight, they'll change. it's more: learn how to think more rationally about it and then you can act on that more... and for youth versus adults, that would be a better route for parents to be cognizant of if their child has a problem, mark? oh, i think so. there's a few other things that are really critical components of adolescent treatment as well. let me just say quickly family involvement is absolutely critical, not just counseling while they're in treatment, but coaching parents how to deal with the ups and downs of post-treatment recovery. well thank you, thank you. greg, let's go to you. i try to get-to get placed in a treatment program and i cannot. my parents can't find anything. is there anything that parents and families can do? yeah. i mean, it's a challenging time for a lot of families.

the system that we've set up, you know, publicly and privately, is not the easiest thing to access, you know, behavioral health services. and, you know, there are a lot of stipulations and qualifications that young people need to meet in order to be accepted into a treatment program and have the resources to fund the treatment program. so we do find a lot of young people in that area and a lot of families in that area of not knowing how to access services. and one of the biggest supports that our organization does, connecticut turning to youth and families, we do peer-to-peer support, you know, and we do from a lived experience perspective. so my family can support another family on how we accessed the system and how we kind of talked to same of how to access state benefits and a young person in recovery knows how to fill out the form down at the social service office to get you on

services to access, you know, a bed, you know, there's also that in between. a lot of those things take weeks sometimes. and, you know, what do you do in between? if there's a critical time and there's a lot community-based peer support out there, you know, mutual support groups or, you know, online stuff where people can connect with people and live recovery experience so that way they at least have some social support, you know, if they're in need of treatment. and then there's also a lot of young people who may not need, you know, residential treatment and they might be better suited to stay at home or to be in the community and just, you know, work on the recovery from that place. and greg, just one more thing, in terms of finding recovery services, i know that you're familiar with faces and voices of recovery, but can families go online and find similar programs like the one you have in connecticut? it's not so easy right now. i mean, honestly, you know, recovery supports

for young people is gravely understudied, underfunded, under supported across the board. so while there's a lot of hope out there and there's a lot of young people in recovery, they're not so easy to find. you know, the best supports out there are local, you know, mutual support groups that are focused to young people that are the easiest thing to access. so, you know, whether or not somebody wants to find a meeting in their local area, a lot of the 12-step groups will have, you know, a youth category, you know, that'll say that this meeting might be more focused to young people. monique, how do i get into if i'm in need of a recovery school? how do i approach the various schools? are they available to everyone all over the united states or is it only in certain pockets? unfortunately, there are recovery high schools in only eight states and collegiate recovery communities in nine states. so i think that speaks right there to how

underserved adolescents and young adults are in the area of addiction. however, we are in eight states and we are in nine states and how do you access a recovery high school or collegiate program? well, first you could go to our web site and you can see where the different high schools and colleges are located and it would be as simple as contacting them directly and asking what their enrollment criteria that's going to vary between high schools and college programs. and even individual high schools may have different enrollment criteria. but basically we're looking for students and families that are committed to their education and their recovery, are committed to abstinence from drugs and alcohol, other than prescriptions that, you know, are prescribed by a medical doctor and who want an environment that is academic, first and foremost, with embedded recovery support. and from there, it's pretty open to students

who desire and want to seek that out. and how can the public, i mean, obviously if there are families that are among our audience will say, well, you know, i would love to have this, you know, i have a son or daughter in recovery. how do they approach recovery schools to put together a program in a school? a lot of times the recovery high schools and college programs are local efforts to be created because education policy is different from state to state, how it is funded is usually the biggest issue and that again is going to be specialized state to state. and how are they funded? give us some idea. all of the recovery high schools right now are publicly funded whether that be through public education dollars or charter school model at the high school level. at the college and university that gets a little bit different and is typically more focused on what the university can support or maybe some fundraising efforts.

so again it's going to be very local in how they're funded and what access they have to monies to do those types of programs. fran, you spoke about community and we have heard that in order to keep a young person that's in recovery free of alcohol and drugs, again, there has to be a whole support system. how can communities, how can families begin to support considering the lack of extensive, you know, network of recovery support systems for youth, how can families and communities help? families and communities can help a lot. we have over a thousand what we call community coalitions. and a coalition is a group of interested people in a community coming together for a common goal. and what the coalition's job is, is to connect people to services, connect people with

helping to restrict availability of drugs and alcohol in a community, to strengthen laws, policies, and get them enforced to working with your law enforcement officers and associate with the schools. so we, i would say that within every state we have a good handful of coalitions. we need many more. but every state office of behavioral health, alcohol and drugs or mental health should have a listing of those coalitions and i would say parents if they were really looking and were lost and didn't know how to maneuver the waters because some of what you're talking about is very true, i would call the state office first and get a connection and then go from there. well, when we come back, we're going to be talking about what we can do as individuals in order to help youth not even get into alcohol or drugs. we'll be right back. for more information on national alcohol and drug addiction recovery month events in your town and how you can get involved,

visit the recovery month web site at recoverymonth.gov. i'm a sophomore in college this year. man, if you had known me when i was a sophomore in high school, nobody could tell me anything. i gave all my teachers a bad time. they all gave up on me, except my english teacher. eight years teaching high school english, 10 years in recovery for alcohol addiction. to be or not to be. i got help. that's it right there. when you get help, who knows just who you'll help along the way? for drugs and alcohol information and treatment referral for youth or someone you know, call 1-800-662-help. [music] the mission of southern california alcohol and drug programs is to bring alcohol and

drug services to the people in the areas in which they live who might not get these services if these programs are not established. si se puede program is individualized treatment for substance abuse for teenagers, utilizing an evidence- based model called acra. this program came from a federal grant that we receive, from csat and aaft. and what is done is assertive adolescent family treatment. each individual is unique. each individual needs a variety of services to help them on the road to recovery from the chronic relapsing disease of alcoholism and drug abuse and the chronic nature of mental illness. in addition, there are many other people affected by

these illnesses who are in need of ongoing services as well. i've been doing this for 14 years and i finally found something that i can see the change, which is having the youth come in, having the families come in, putting them together and finding the things that they really value. i think that's the most important thing of our program. and also the environment that we sit in. when they come in, they feel accepted, they feel we're very warm, we speak spanish, we're bilingual because most of our clients are, you know, bilingual, so i think that they feel, they feel at home. awsome to see you today, before we begin our session, you know, can i offer you a snack or anything? the curricula itself provides all the family involvement but we went and tried to make it more latino oriented in the sense of instead of giving them snacks like granola bars or an apple or stuff like that,

we change it a little bit and we give them more culturally sensitive like a burrito or hot cheetos that they like. also we have monthly family gatherings where we all pitch in and cook. and i say we all because the staff gets involved, the care giver is involved, even the teenager is involved. and that's what we change in it. i was just going out all the time and drinking and not listening to my mom. and i didn't care what she said or what she did and i just didn't care about anything. i just wanted to do what i wanted to do. i was here before. this will be my second time here. and in the beginning it was helping but i still didn't get it through my head and now everything is much better, like i get along with my mom. i talk to her a lot about everything. she gained all her trust back. i am extremely proud of this program.

it works. it does what i think is most important. it keeps kids in school. it develops better communication and rapport in the home. it helps the youth reduce the gangs and the negative influences in the neighborhood and it gives them time, i don't care if it's a year, that's the most important time when the brain is developing, when you're in high school, when these decisions affect the rest of your life. and if they can reduce their alcohol and drug use and graduate and get along with their families and not get swept up into criminality, i consider that a fantastic success and that's how i see this program. i really believe this program is doing that. fran, talk to us a little bit about what samhsa is doing

to prevent youth from getting into trouble? we're actually doing a lot, especially in the last couple of years. we have, with our new administration, samhsa has made prevention of substance abuse and mental illness a priority, which has really put a lot of energy across the country into doing prevention programs for our young people. the biggest, which we've been doing a lot of talking about, approach, is to get to the parents. we just released a media campaign that showed that 40 percent of our young people between the ages of 12 and 20 have used alcohol and are experimenting with it. now that means 60 percent have not. so we are seeing a steady decline but not enough. we don't want 40 percent of our young people using. so we are working with our parents in programming, we're working with increasing our community program.

we are mixing together both evidence-based programs, which mark talked a little bit about in the treatment area, we have the same type of programs and prevention that are based in evidence with what monique talked about a little bit about environmental programs, changing the conditions and the norms of a community, one community at a time, and adding to this a huge focus on collaborating with all of our federal, state, and local partners. we have found that's really the key, that we need to work with our fda. we need to work with the center for disease control. we need to work with criminal justice and departments of education along with parents and help people see that substance abuse and mental illness is just another illness that we are dealing with in our country just like we are cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and the rest. and the underage drinking campaign as well. the underage drinking campaign continues to be a focus in this year and the next couple of years

samhsa is putting a greater emphasis on underage drinking because underage drinking still remains our number one problem with youth, and it's a preventable problem. so if we can package up everything we've been talking about, put our resources behind it with our collaborative friends, we will begin to make a positive difference and once and for all really bring these numbers down to a manageable level of use. monique, you've mentioned that it is a limited footprint for recovery schools. talk to us a little bit about what the regular school systems, both on the private side as well as the public school systems need to be aware of in order to provide the best possible opportunities for youth who may get in trouble with some interventions that may basically allow them to have a normal and productive school experience. sure. well, i mean, some students that are

chemically dependent are always going to need a recovery school of some sort or that type of support. however, the public schools and the private schools can do a lot to help prevent, as fran was talking about, using some of these collaborative efforts at the state and local levels. and also the schools can provide education prevention intervention services. maybe that would be through a student assistance program, maybe through having something like a chemical health specialist in their buildings to help facilitate and support those students. or if their local community doesn't have a recovery high school or collegiate program, maybe being able to support those students when they're returning from treatment so that they can have access to an adult who is trained in dealing with addiction and recovery. mark had mentioned earlier that, you know, an adolescent coming out of treatment and working on

recovery is going to have issues and they're going to need support and the families need support and education on what that's going to look like. and the schools can also be a part of helping facilitate and educate those families and support those families and students when they return. and just to add one thing, there's also this emerging peer-support models in public schools that we're seeing in connecticut and we're seeing successful uses of support models within a school system where they're addressing, you know, alcohol and drug use, maybe not always to dependent, fully dependent kids, but maybe at risk youth so they would bridge sort of that prevention and recovery sector and have kids acknowledge and talk about their use and sort of connect their use to their consequences, you know, in a school setting because kids are there, you know, 6 hours a day, so it's a great place. greg, talk to us about what you would have done differently when you first started to experience problems.

well, i mean, i think that, you know, as an individual going through adolescence i didn't, you know, i didn't reason, i don't reason, i don't fear, you know, it's the science of it, you know, i do what feels good. and that's true adolescence. so i don't know necessarily, you know, i could say that i as an individual would have done something differently at 14 or 15. i mean, obviously i could have made better choices, you know, but it's that support system around me that could have helped to influence like, you know, if i was in a public school that had a peer support model, you know, i would have been acknowledging the consequences of my addiction earlier, you know, because i just, you know, at 16, i just liked to party, you know, that was what i said and that's what i believed. and i was in denial that, you know, because i liked to party, i was cut from the baseball team. i was in denial that now i'm getting "c"s in school, you know, that it was related. i didn't have any, you know, i really didn't want to believe that and i didn't have any idea, where, from an outsider it's obvious, you know,

what's going on. but for me as an adolescent, you know, i never connected it. mark, do you use student assistance programs? do you tap them; do you tap other resources, community resources? student assistance programs are a vital part of a continuum of care and it accesses young people at an early age and one of the things we know is that if we can access young people when they're initially starting to develop the problem that we can short circuit the length of time that they'll have problems and that's a huge finding so that the average amount of time they'll have problems is far less. so student assistance programs are vitally important. unfortunately, student assistance programs are not in abundance. and as states have experienced revenue shortfalls, that's one of the first areas they cut. in my home state of illinois, we've cut

funding for student assistance or early intervention programs because the state is always going to see their mission first as taking care of the sickest of the sick. but it's a vitally important component and so we need to have that for that early intervention and those kinds of programs can and are successful. i think, you know, you've hit on something that i think every single state...i was just listening to a radio show yesterday and they were talking about the dire circumstances, budgetary circumstances that many of the states...under that particular outlook, fran, what really should families be looking to? in other words, if in fact they don't have student assistance programs, if in fact the treatment system is going to be affected by budgetary constraints, what can we tell our audience to do under those circumstances?

first and foremost, look to see if you have one of those community coalitions near you, because the federal government, we're putting a lot of money and we're working in great partnership with the office of national drug control policy, the u.s. department of education, the u.s. department of justice and of course, samhsa, to bring dollars to the local level so people can come together. if there isn't a coalition, parents could consider bringing people together themselves and going online to the samhsa web site and be able to learn how to bring a coalition together, who should be there at the table, how do i get expertise, and it's very accessible. we have a facebook page now. everything is becoming far easier to approach and to get our messages out. have the power of a coalition of every single person in a community that touches a child come together and talk about what needs to be done and then learn the tools of bringing in, to do an

assessment as we do in treatment, we do in the community, we can then begin the process and start. our new health reform legislation is going to help us because we are bringing in the attention and the dollars to support the funding for prevention, for treatment, and for recovery services. so our future is very bright but a parent needs to see that they are in the driver's seat and that no one program is going to do it. so bringing multiple kinds of approaches together throughout the continuum is the best advice i think we can give parents. i could just illustrate what fran's talking about in our hometown of bloomington, illinois. we have a parent coalition that was supported in part by samhsa's funding and one of the things they've done is they've created a parent-to-parent network. and they sign up and they agree to notify each other about parties and to check things out and one of the

most gratifying things when my daughter was in high school and she was having a party, we got a call from a parent who wanted to check out to make sure that we were going to be there and that it was on the up and up. so they're effective? well it can be effective and it's a good thing, you bet. okay. final thoughts, monique. well, i think that there's a lot of hope out there for adolescents and young adults that are struggling with addiction and i also think there's a lot of hope in providing prevention and intervention for those students at an earlier age to prevent or delay the onset of use and ultimately we're going to have healthier students and adults. greg, your thoughts. i think just, you know, we need to move away from sort of this punitive, you know, don't talk about it, kind of hide it from everybody, you know, because it's happening, it exists and until we accept it as a society and communities that alcohol and drugs is an issue, you know, we're not going to

address it and we're not going to be able to solve, you know, it as a, as it really is, a public health crisis. and that recovery is in fact possible through adequate treatment and family supports. thank you for being here. we've had a great show. i want to remind our audience that september is national alcohol and drug addiction recovery month and we celebrate it every september. we want you to get involved, get engaged, and support those in recovery and those who serve them. thank you for being here. for a copy of this program or other programs in the road to recovery series, call samhsa at 1-800-662-help or order online at recoverymonth.gov and click "multimedia." every september, national alcohol and drug addiction recovery month provides an opportunity

for communities like yours to r raise awareness of alcohol and drug use disorders and highlight the effectiveness of treatment. in order to help you plan events and activities in commemoration of this year's recovery month observance, the free recovery month kit offers ideas, materials, and tools for planning, organizing, and realizing an event or outreach campaign that matches your goals and resources. to obtain your copy of this year's recovery month kit and gain access to other free publications and materials related to addiction treatment and recovery issues, visit the recovery month web site at www.recoverymonth.gov or call 1-800-622-help. it's important that everyone become involved because addiction is our nation's number one health problem and treatment is our best tool to address it.

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