Brief Intervention for Drug Abusing Adolescents

Consists of 60 minute individual sessions delivered with a therapist using a motivational interviewing (MI) style. Session 1 focuses on eliciting information about the students' substance use and related consequences based on the assessment, their perception of level of willingness to change, examining the cause and benefits of change using the decisional balance exercise, and discussing what goals for change the student would like to select and pursue. Session 2 reviewed the students' progress with the agreed upon goals, identifying high risk situations associated with clients difficulty in achieving the goals, discussing strategies to address barriers toward goal attainment, reviewing where the client is in the stage of change process, and negotiating either the continuation of goals or advancing to more ambitious goals of substance use reduction. Session 3 involved delivering the same MI interviewing style to the primary parent or guardian (student is not present).