Addressing Substance Use Issues in Higher Ed: Lessons Learned from Treatment Providers

Addressing Substance Use Issues in Higher Ed:

Lessons Learned from Treatment Providers

When considering issues related to alcohol and other drug (AOD) use in higher education, the focus is frequently placed on collegiate binge drinking.  Like a family preoccupied with the substance use of a member, higher education tends to focus on its student drinkers.  However, because one drinker in a family has a problem, that does not mean all drinkers in the family do. Likewise, because some students are high-risk drinkers does not mean all students are.  What if an entire college or university were approached as an identified client in need of assistance, in much the same way a treatment provider engages the family of a problem drinker when providing assistance?  What has the treatment community learned over the years that enable it to work effectively with families?  Perhaps such topics of importance to those treating families might be of interest to senior administrators in higher education looking to approach collegiate drinking differently.

Treatment facilities focus on helping families recognize that…what causes a problem is a problem when it causes a problem.  This truism is pretty clear when dealing with individuals and families; it is less clear, however, when considering how this applies to a college of university.  How do we help Institutions of Higher Education (IHE) to understand "their AOD problem" is not exclusively the student drinker? 

Focusing attention on the high-risk drinker has yielded evidence-informed approaches to intervention with these consumers, but this is more an informed “reaction” to the “perceived problem" than indicative of definitive “action taken” to prevent it.  Just as families learn that they cannot stop a member from drinking or drugging, IHEs need to recognize that neither can they stop collegiate drinking.  What families learn in treatment is how to focus on their issues and concentrate on that over which they do have control.

For families, change manifests itself in the form of establishing and consistently maintaining appropriate boundaries, assertively and proactively intervening when encountering unacceptable behavior, understanding the true nature of substance use disorders (SUD), and accepting that the issue of primacy is not changing the user, but recognizing that the family, as a whole, must address its problem.  Families working on their issues accept the things they cannot change, but nonetheless work to change the things they can.  For IHEs, addressing issues of concern regarding AOD use re remarkably similar to the objectives of families in treatment. 

Like the family, an IHE needs to establish and maintain realistic boundaries.  In the prevention literature this is part of what is called environmental management.  Where families assertively and proactively intervene with members displaying maladaptive behaviors, IHE employ brief motivational interventions or employ evidence-informed programs like Brief Alcohol Screening and Intervention for College Students (BASICS).  When families come together to consider that its problem is not the result of an individual with a SUD, but the family as a unit that needs to accept its responsibility to act on its needs rather than react to the member “with the problem,” IHEs can collaborate with its stakeholders in the community, both on and off campus, to establish and then embrace a collaborative, solution-focused approach to a perennial and heretofore perceived intractable problem.

There is much that IHEs can learn from families that have received treatment for a SUD.  Although social scientists of all descriptions are consistently contributing to the body of knowledge related to campus “binge drinking” and drug use, there is room for the SUD treatment community to proffer assistance to its colleagues in IHEs.

What do you think?