What happens is that adolescents, their clinical presentation is very different from adults, there's a lot of differences and there are some similarities and with adolescents they are not, generally in danger of losing anything really significant. They don't have jobs, they're not married, they don't have children, they live at home, they have a roof over their heads and food on the table, and transportation of some kind and they don't get how impactful their drug taking and/or drinking is to their lives, all they know is that some adult in their life is saying, "What you're doing is not appropriate and not healthy and you need to get help."
So one of the things that we're very cautious of at Quest is working with kids with motivational interviewing and we use a lot of MI because we want to find out what the child wants to get out treatment. And if it's just to get the P.O. off their back, then it's like, okay, well how do we do that? Well, I need to have negative U.A.. Okay, well to get a negative U.A., what do we need to do? You know, those kinds of things. So it's just really interesting and one of the things that I ask all clients to do, I never ask anybody to quit drinking or drugging for life, that's not kind of my M.O., what I ask them to do sometimes is see if you can stop long enough to make a truly conscious decision about whether or not you wanna continue using. Like, what is your life like when you use and what's your life like when you don't use. I really kind of like that little cartoon. And then the one, the big one next to it with the myriad of drugs and alcohol and syringes, I just thought it was a really good illustration about we can become addicted to such a wide variety of substances, there's just a million things out there that alter our moods and our minds and so I just appreciated the fact that there was cocaine and marijuana and needles and alcohol and a little bit of everything there. so it just gives an example of the wide variety of things that we can, as humans, become addicted to. And then of course the gentleman in the upper left hand corner, looking incredibly distressed, once again, we're back to that phrase about significant distress, what is going on in your life around whatever the behavior is and how has it impacted you and how has it impacted your life and do you want help and what do you want to do about it? - [Voiceover] Thanks, Denise, when I look at that picture, this is Denise Q., some of those things were around me when I was growing up, I would have never thought that that stuff or any of the inhalants were an issue. It wasn't until I got into this line of work that I found out that a person with a mind to go out and have an altered experience is gonna be able to find it in a whole lot of different ways. Do you remember when the little special cap started showing up on the whipping cream because people were huffing the inhalant stuff out of whipping cream cans? - [Voiceover] Exactly. - [Voiceover] Do you still encounter stuff like that in some of your clients at Quest? - [Voiceover] Oh, younger kids. Yeah, our 12, 13, 14 year olds have a more difficult time accessing alcohol and drugs sometimes and the inhalants are so much easier to get, but we've had quite a few kids that are still doing that kind of thing, they're still using gasoline dust-off, any sort of product that they can blow into a paper bag and then practically asphyxiate themselves with. And it's so damaging to their developing brains. That's something that we're gonna address a little bit later on.
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