Chapter 9 - The Teen Intervention Project: A School-Based Intervention for Adolescents with Substance Use Problems

Abstract

The Teen Intervention Project (TIP) is a controlled clinical trial funded by the national institute on alcohol abuse and alcoholism to test the efficacy of a standardized Student Assistance Program (SAP) for treating adolescents with alcohol and other drug use problems. SAPs are the most common type of school-based intervention programs for substance-misusing teens, and they have two main components: (1) mechanisms for early identification of students with alcohol, and/or (2) other drug use problems and methods for secondary and tertiary prevention of adverse consequences associated with those problems. As such, SAPs differ from primary prevention programs that are directed at reducing the likelihood of substance use and abuse among the general population of students. The importance of SAPs for treating adolescent substance abuse, empirical tests of their effectiveness are clearly needed, both in terms of their overall impact in reducing use as well as investigating the specific “active ingredients” that contribute to change. To accomplish this, TIP provides a school-based, Group-Counseling (GC) program in which students receive ten weekly sessions of in-school, manual-based treatment.