Routine care interventions with the parents of adult drug and alcohol users

Abstract

Introduction and aims: To explore routine care interventions which enable parents to support the therapeutic effort of their adult child in drug and alcohol treatment.

Design and methods: Inductive content analysis was used to analyze the experiences of 31 Greek addiction professionals who participated in focus groups.

Findings: Professionals adopted various interventions which included (a) respond to parents quest for help, (b) involvement of the distant parent in treatment, (c) boundary setting, (d) facilitation of parent-child communication, and (e) support of parental changes. These interventions were perceived as necessary, both for motivating and sustaining the client’s change, and for alleviating the parents’ chronic grief and distress over their child’s addiction.

Conclusion: Overall, addiction professionals perceived low intensity interventions, information giving, and non- judgmental informal interactions as catalysts for the parents involvement in addiction treatment.

Keywords:

• Addiction treatment
• focus groups
• parents
• family interventions
• inductive content analysis
• alcoholism

Acknowledgements

Gratitude is extended to the therapists who participated in the study and to Dr. Katerina Matsa for her invaluable guidance and inspiration.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.