Clinical Handbook of Adolescent Addiction (ePub)

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.