Adolescent Addiction: Epidemiology, Assessment, and Treatment presents a comprehensive review of information on adolescent addiction, including prevalence and co-morbidity rates, risk factors to addiction, and prevention and treatment strategies. Unlike other books that may focus on one specific addiction, this book covers a wide range of addictions in adolescents, including alcohol, cannabis, tobacco, eating, gambling, internet and video games, and sex addiction. Organized into three sections, the book begins with the classification and assessment of adolescent addiction. Section two has one chapter each on the aforementioned addictions, discussing for each the definition, epidemiology, risk factors, co-morbidity, course and outcome, and prevention and intervention. Section three discusses the assessment and treatment of co-morbid conditions in greater detail as well as the social and political implications of adolescent addictions. Intended to be of practical use to clinicians treating adolescent addiction, the book contains a wealth of information that will be of use to the researcher as well. Contributors to the book represent the US, Canada, the UK, New Zealand, and Australia. About the Editor: Cecilia A. Essau is professor of developmental psychopathology at Roehampton University in London, UK. Specializing in child and adolescent psychopathology, she has been an author or editor of 12 previous books in child psychopathology and is author of over 100 research articles and book chapters in this area. Comprehensive with the state-of-the-art information on important and the most common adolescent addiction Easy to understand and organized chapters Written by international experts

Since 1960, the burden of adolescent illness has shifted from the traditional causes of disease to the more behavior-related problems, such as drinking, smoking and drug abuse (nearly half of American adolescents have used an illicit drug sometime during their life). Instilling in adolescents the knowledge, skills, and values that foster physical and mental health will require substantial changes in the way health professionals work and the way they connect with families, schools, and community organizations. At the same time, the major textbooks on addiction medicine and addiction psychiatry devote relatively little attention to the special problems of diagnosing and treating adolescent addicts. Similarly, the major textbooks on general and child and adolescent psychiatry direct relatively little attention to the issues surrounding adolescent addiction. The Clinical Handbook of Adolescent Addiction is one response to the challenge of meeting the mental health needs and behavior-related problems of addicted teenagers. The work has been edited as an independent project by members of the American Society for Adolescent Psychiatry, the oldest professional organization of psychiatrists devoted solely to the mental health care and treatment of teenagers in the USA. The forensic psychiatry perspective permeates the entire book. It will help to produce health providers with a deep and sensitive understanding of the developmental needs and behavior-related problems of adolescents. The Clinical Handbook of Adolescent Addiction is a practical tool for all those who help adolescents: practitioners of family medicine, general psychiatrists, child/adolescent psychiatrists, adolescent psychiatrists, addiction psychiatrists, non-psychiatric physicians specializing in addiction medicine, forensic psychiatrists, psychologists, clinical social workers, mental health administrators, Court/Probation/ Parole/Correctional health workers. The book is organized in a user-friendly format so that readers can easily locate the chapters that provide the information that is required. In some instances, topics of special importance deliberately have been addressed in more than one chapter, to illuminate the topics from a variety of vantage points. One aim of the editors is to move the topic from being a specialist area to a generalist one by providing tools for generalist to use.

This volume reviews a range of empirically supported approaches to prevention and treatment of adolescent substance use problems. The focus is on motivationally based brief interventions that can be delivered in a variety of contexts, that address key developmental considerations, and that draw on cutting-edge knowledge on addictive behavior change. From expert contributors, coverage encompasses alcohol skills training; integrative behavioral and family therapy; motivational interviewing; interventions for dually diagnosed youth; Internet-based education, prevention, and treatment; and applications to HIV prevention. The volume is extensively referenced and includes numerous clinical illustrations and vignettes.

Adolescent substance abuse is the nation's #1 public health problem. It originates out of a developmental era where experimentation with the world is increasingly taking place, and where major changes in physical self and social relationships are taking place. These changes cannot be understood by any one discipline nor can they be described by focusing only on the behavioral and social problems of this age period, the characteristics of normal development, or the pharmacology and addictive potential of specific drugs. They require knowledge of the brain's systems of reward and control, genetics, psychopharmacology, personality, child development, psychopathology, family dynamics, peer group relationships, culture, social policy, and more. Drawing on the expertise of the leading researchers in this field, this Handbook provides the most comprehensive summarization of current knowledge about adolescent substance abuse. The Handbook is organized into eight sections covering the literature on the developmental context of this life period, the epidemiology of adolescent use and abuse, similarities and differences in use, addictive potential, and consequences of use for different drugs; etiology and course as characterized at different levels of mechanistic analysis ranging from the genetic and neural to the behavioural and social. Two sections cover the clinical ramifications of abuse, and prevention and intervention strategies to most effectively deal with these problems. The Handbook's last section addresses the role of social policy in framing the problem, in addressing it, and explores its potential role in alleviating it.

This book was first published in 2006. Adolescent drug abuse is one of the most challenging disorders to treat. It impacts on schools, community-based programs, mental health and medical facilities, and juvenile justice settings. This book provides practitioners, program developers and policy makers with practical information for improving outcomes in adolescent substance abuse. The authors cover a range of issues, including empirically based treatment development protocols, how to incorporate innovative treatment models into diverse clinical settings; research advances; interventions with special populations, culturally based intervention guidelines, and recommendations for practice and policy.

Treating substance abuse in adolescents requires a creative integration of individual, group, and family therapy, along with an understanding of addiction and recovery, family dynamics, and adolescent development. This book incorporates all of these elements into its discussion. Its thoroughness makes it a valuable addition to the literature in this relatively new clinical specialty. --Joseph K. Nowinski, Private Practice "This is a hopeful book that promotes a comprehensive view of a complicated difficulty." --Virginia Child Protection Newsletter