Elliott Currie's The Road to Whatever has a chapter, " "There's No Help Out There": The World of Therapeutic Darwinism" in which he commented on the negative, punitive approach to teen drug treatment:
Indeed, the degree to which an emphasis on punishment dominated the inner culture of many "helping" programs bordered on the bizarre. Every institution that deals with troubled people, to be sure, requires some way of maintaining discipline, and achieving a blaance between discipline and support is never easy. But the discipline meeted out in many of the gaencies encountered by these teenagers was often explicitly designed to demean and humiliate them. (p. 161)
I was curious about alternatives to 12-step programs for teens in drug- and alcohol recovery.
I found Dr. Robert Schwebel's Seven Challenges program, which looks like it meets many of Currie's criteria for effectiveness.
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