Adolescence: Contemporary Issues and Resources.

Research the range of contemporary issues teenagers face today. In a 500-750-word paper, choose one issue (besides teen pregnancy) and discuss its effect on adolescent behavior and overall well-being. Include the following in your submission: 1) Adolescence: Contemporary Issues and Resources.

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Describe the contemporary issue and explain what external stressors are associated with this issue. 2) Outline assessment strategies to screen for this issue and external stressors during an assessment for an adolescent patient. Describe what additional assessment questions you would need to ask and define the ethical parameters regarding what you can and cannot share with the parent or guardian. 3) Discuss support options for adolescents encountering external stressors. Include specific support options for the contemporary issue you presented. -double spaced -running head and title -no abstract -no plagiarism -include in text citations -drug use is the teen issue of choice.Adolescence: Contemporary Issues and Resources.

Substance Abuse among Teenagers

Substance abuse among teens has the potential to impact the well-being and health of an individual. Through cooperation with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC),The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) would develop a guide on how to implement screening for substance abuse in pediatric practices to assist medical practitioners in addressing substance use concerns. The AAP has recommended screening for substance abuse on children beginning from the age of nine.Adolescence: Contemporary Issues and Resources.

According to the AAP, the most commonly abused substances are alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana. Adolescents often abuse these drugs. In the 12^th grade, nearly two-thirds of children have tried alcohol at least once. Nearly half of the students of the 9^th through 12^th grade have used marijuana. Four out of ten students in the 12^th grade have tried smoking cigarettes. About a fifth of the 12^th-grade students has reported the use of prescription medication with no prescription. While it is illegal for Americans under the age of 21 to consume alcohol, research has shown that one-tenth of the alcohol consumed in the U.S is consumed by people between the ages of twelve and twenty (Amirloo et al., 2018).Adolescence: Contemporary Issues and Resources.

Intense stress has been found to increase substance abuse. Therefore, this has called for an analysis like family and external stressors that teenagers face that causes them to engage in substance abuse. So far, not much is known about the extent to which different forms of stress need be weighed regarding how they affect substance abuse; family related stress factors are known to affect substance abuse differently from external stress factors. Family-related stress factors have a greater impact on substance abuse than external stress factors, with the strongest association with substance abuse being a lack of parental monitoring (Levy and Williams, 2016).Adolescence: Contemporary Issues and Resources.

When it comes to assessing substance abuse in teenagers, the first step involves identifying problems resulting from substance abuse, psychosocial maladjustment, and psychiatric comorbidity. Screening tools are short interviews and self-reports used as the initial step in evaluating whether a teenager may or may not have a drug problem.These tools’ features include simple scoring, strong psychometric properties, administration time, efficient length, and user training. Two recommended tools are the Personal Experience Screening Questionnaire and CRAFFT (Bivin and Riaz, 2017). Together with these tools, certain parameter questions will also prove useful. One question pertains to whether the teenager drinks to feel better about them, relax, or fit in. Secondly, it is important to ask whether the patient drinks while alone. It is also useful to know where any of the patient’s closest friends drinks. Finally, the patient should be asked if any family member has a drinking problem and has ever been in trouble for drinking. The legal community offers adolescents that display a certain level of maturity at the discretion of making decisions about their health without their parents’ involvement. However, this ethical decision is left to the medical practitioner addressing the case (Das et al., 2016).Adolescence: Contemporary Issues and Resources.

Research by Jiloha (2017)shows that among interventions for smoking or tobacco, school-based prevention programs coupled with family-based interventions addressing the family’s functioning effectively reduce smoking. Campaigns on mass media have also proved to be effective, given that they are of moderate-intensity and run for extensive periods. When it comes to interventions for alcohol use, family-based interventions have been seen to have a small yet consistent effect on alcohol misuse. School-based prevention interventions, on the other hand, have resulted in reduced drinking frequency among teenagers. For drug use, successful interventions include school-based ones accompanied by social influence approaches and social competence. The above combination results in protective effects against the use of drugs (Biglan and Van Ryzin 2019).Adolescence: Contemporary Issues and Resources.