Mindfulness Training as an Intervention for Substance User Incarcerated Adolescents: A Pilot Grounded Theory Study

Abstract

Mindfulness-based treatment for adolescents is a clinical and research field still in its infancy. Literature is needed to address specific subcultural populations to expand this growing field. Further, minimal literature addresses the process of teaching mindfulness to adolescents. The current study investigated how to effectively teach mindfulness to 10 incarcerated adolescent substance users (N = 10) in an urban California detention setting. A grounded theory approach was used to collect and analyze interview data over a 1-year period during 2011 and 2012 in order to develop an initial theory for teaching mindfulness to incarcerated adolescent substance users. Implications, limitations, and future research are discussed.

Keywords :

• mindfulness
• substance abuse
• incarcerated adolescents
• juvenile offender
• substance use
• alcohol abuse

THE AUTHORS

Sam Himelstein, Ph.D., a formerly incarcerated youth himself, is dedicated to and passionate about serving high-risk and incarcerated youth through the practice of mindfulness and other emotional intelligence skills. He brings a great deal of both personal and professional experience to his role as Executive Director of The Mind Body Awareness Project. As a young adolescent, Sam was heavily involved in the juvenile justice system and was incarcerated on several occasions over a period of 3 years. He was on a personal path to destruction, struggling with drugs, violence, delinquency, and most notably anger. He eventually turned his life around through connections with mentors, personal inner work (including mindfulness meditation), and the never-ending love and support of his parents. Sam went on to graduate high school, college, and eventually pursued his PhD in Clinical Psychology. He received his PhD from Sofia University (formerly the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology) where he is now Associate Core Faculty, teaching classes on the incorporation of mindfulness into psychotherapy in the low-residency master's program. Sam completed the first published research for MBA, entitled, “A Mixed Methods Study of a Mindfulness-Based Intervention with Incarcerated Youth.” as his dissertation. He has been involved with MBA for over 5 years in many different positions including MBA Instructor, Program Manager, and Director of Research and has dedicated his career to working with high-risk and incarcerated adolescents. His knowledge and love for this work has been compiled in his upcoming book, “A Mindfulness-Based Approach to Working with High-Risk Adolescents,” which will be published by Routledge in April of 2013.

Stephen Saul, MA., graduated in 2011 from San Francisco State University with a master's degree in Counseling, specializing in Marriage and Family Therapy. Since that time, he is been working as a mental health clinician for the San Mateo County based agency StarVista, serving incarcerated and underprivileged adolescents and young adults. He is co-authoring the forthcoming book “Mindfulness-based substance abuse treatment for high-risk adolescents.”

Albert Garcia-Romeu, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he is currently researching the effects of psychedelic compounds in human subjects, with a focus on psilocybin as a potential aid in the treatment of addiction. He received his doctorate at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology where he studied the measurement and experience of self-transcendence in healthy adults. He has volunteered with nonprofit organizations, such as Vision Youthz, providing mentorship to incarcerated boys in the San Francisco juvenile justice system, and Pathways Hospice, offering comfort to sick and elderly clients, and grief support for their families. His other research interests include the neural and genetic correlates of self-transcendence, potential clinical applications of mindfulness and altered states of consciousness, psychospiritual development, integral theory, and the synthesis of diverse scientific and spiritual paradigms toward novel understandings of consciousness. Please send any correspondence to [email protected].

Daniel Pinedo, MA, is currently a doctoral clinical psychology student working on his dissertation. His topic is about the experience and effects on emotion regulation and self-compassion of a mindfulness retreat with a group of primarily Latino, college-bound youth. He has worked with homeless, high-risk, and incarcerated adolescents as a clinician, as an educator, and as a mentor.

Notes

2 Treatment can be briefly and usefully defined as a unique, planned, goal-directed, temporally structured, multidimensional change process, of necessary quality, appropriateness, and conditions (endogenous and exogenous), which is bounded ( culture, place, time, etc.) and can be categorized into professional-based, tradition-based, mutual-help-based (AA, NA, etc.) and self-help (“natural recovery”) models. There are no unique models or techniques used with substance users—of whatever types and heterogeneities—which are not also used with nonsubstance users. Whether or not, a treatment technique is indicated or contraindicated, and its selection underpinnings (theory-based, empirically-based, “principle of faith-based, tradition-based, etc.) continues to be a generic and key treatment issue. In the West, with the relatively new ideology of “harm reduction” and the even newer Quality of Life (QOL) and wellbeing treatment-driven models, there are now new sets of goals in addition to those derived from/associated with the older tradition of abstinence-driven models. Conflict-resolution models may stimulate an additional option for intervention. Each ideological model has its own criteria for success as well as failure as well as iatrogenic-related harms. Treatment is implemented in a range of environments; ambulatory as well as within institutions which can include controlled environments Treatment includes a spectrum of clinician–caregiver–patient relationships representing various forms of decision-making traditions/models: (1) the hierarchical model in which the clinician-treatment agent makes the decision(s) and the recipient is compliant and relatively passive, (2) shared decision-making which facilitates the collaboration between clinician and patient(s) in which both are active, and (3) the “informed model” in which the patient makes the decision(s). Editor's note

3 The reader is reminded that the concepts of “risk factors,” as well as “protective factors,” are often noted in the literature, without adequately noting their dimensions (linear, nonlinear; rates of development; anchoring or integration, cessation, etc.), their “demands,” the critical necessary conditions (endogenously as well as exogenously; from a micro to a meso to a macro level) which are necessary for either of them to operate (begin, continue, become anchored and integrate, change as de facto realities change, cease, etc.) or not to, and whether their underpinnings are theory-driven, empirically-based, individual and/or systemic stake holder- bound, based upon “principles of faith, doctrinaire positions,” “personal truths,” historical observation, precedents, and traditions that accumulate over time, conventional wisdom, perceptual, and judgmental constraints, “transient public opinion,” or what. This is necessary to consider and to clarify if these term are not to remain as yet additional shibboleth in a field of many stereotypes, tradition-driven activities, “principles of faith” and stakeholder objectives. Editor's note.