Dartmouth has partnered with Spectrum Youth and Family Services in Burlington, Vt., an organization that caters to homeless and at-risk youth, to create a program for teens with substance abuse problems.
The Teen Intervention Program against Substance Abuse, known as TIPS, is directed by two Geisel School of Medicine psychiatry professors and focuses on individual counseling for teens. Some participants will also receive additional, more experimental treatments that will evaluate the success of monetary incentives and a working memory treatment.
The program, which launched this fall, is projected to help about 220 teens in the next five years. Five participants are currently enrolled.
With a $2.5-million grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, co-directors Catherine Stanger and Alan Budney said they are excited to implement the teen substance abuse research they have conducted over the past decade at the University of Vermont and Geisel.
The husband-and-wife team started their project by combining Budney’s adult substance abuse research and the developmental psychopathology work Stanger did as a child psychologist.
Stanger said that Spectrum was a good fit for the program because of its commitment to evidence-based practices and its innovative treatments. The collaboration with Spectrum allowed Stanger and Budney to implement their work in an established clinic for the first time, as they had previously relied on research-based clinics that they set up themselves.
“This is an opportunity to do this treatment in a more real-world setting, in a community-based clinic that already exists,” Stanger said.
The program will accept teens between age 12 and 18 with substance abuse problems who are living at home, near Burlington, Budney said.
At Spectrum, all teens receive weekly counseling and opportunities to earn small monetary incentives for good behavior. Spectrum also works with parents to provide specific training that will help curb high-risk behaviors at home.
A proportion, though, receive two additional treatments that Budney and Stanger will incorporate in their research and continue to use in the program if successful. One experimental treatment provides participants with increased incentives halfway through the program if the previous level of incentives does not result in improvement.
Although some scientific research already promotes the ability of increased incentives to help with addiction treatment, Budney said the program is using an additional treatment, made specifically for improving working memory. Five times a week, a proportion of the teens will log on to a computer program that helps increase working memory, which he said improves decision making and other complex mental tasks.
The working memory program uses exercises such as recalling sequences of numbers in the reverse order and engaging in spatial thinking tasks.
Budney seeks to discover if this provides an additional benefit to recipients of counseling and monetary incentives.
The Geisel psychiatry department maintains close ties with Spectrum through WebEx, a video conferencing program that allows Stanger and Budney to meet with Spectrum therapists for weekly meetings. The department and the clinic also share Internet servers, and research assistants from Geisel travel from Burlington to Hanover to assess and track progress.
Stanger said she believes the program will benefit both participants and researchers. By participating in the program, researchers can better understand the underlying causes of substance abuse and addiction.
