Treatment Planning, Matching, and Placement for Adolescents with Substance Use Disorders

One of the greatest challenges in the field of adolescent substance abuse treatment is the attempt to assess the individual needs of drug-involved adolescents and to match them to particular treatment services, modalities, and levels of care. Given that the field is in its very early stages of development, it is natural that most research and even most clinical practices treat adolescent substance use disorders (SUDs) as a single homogeneous entity and adolescents with SUDs as a single homogeneous population. In reality, drug-involved adolescents must represent a heterogeneous mixed population, and the heterogeneity of adolescent SUDs must call for differential treatment approaches. The problem is that we have only begun to explore and articulate a meaningful catalog of the disorders and population subgroups in a way that distinguishes and guides appropriate treatment approaches. This chapter will summarize current clinical consensus principles of treatment matching, review some of the emerging knowledge base that informs those principles, and highlight some important future directions for further investigation.