Price is always a consideration, and your degree of insurance coverage and the amount you can afford to contribute does impact on the decision; but it’s always about more than price, and you want to find a drug or alcohol rehab that offers your teen the best quality treatment, that offers quality teen specific treatments, and that offers them the best total chance of sobriety and a life of health and happiness.

Here are 4 criteria that you may use to help in the evaluation process between available rehabs in your area. This can never be a complete list, and there always intangibles, but using the following criteria may help you to narrow down the list, and may make the decision just a little bit easier.

4 ways to evaluate a teen drug or alcohol rehab

1) Is it a teen specific program?

Although many adult facilities maintain that they can offer effective treatments to people of all ages, teens do far better in age specific programming. Teens do not have the same issues or problems as adults in recovery, and face a completely different set of developmental and recovery challenges. Your teen needs to recover in a teen specific facility, no matter what adult rehabs may say about their ability to handle patients of all ages (What Where to get teen drug treatment).

2) What is the level of family involvement?

Even while you child resides in a drug or alcohol rehab away from home you exert enormous influence, and parental involvement has been proven the single greatest influencing factor over the success of a teen in drug or alcohol rehab. Parental involvement cannot mean occasional phone calls, but should involve a committed and active participation in therapies and educational seminars within the rehab.

These whole family programs can help to heal the family, educate the family about the nature of addiction, and teach the family exactly how they can best support the recovering teen addict once back in the home.

Parental involvement is extremely important, and you should not consider a teen drug or alcohol rehab that does not feature a high level of family participation.

3) What type of academic program is offered?

Many teens enter into a rehab significantly behind in school. No teen using and abusing drugs does well in academically, and many teens in treatment need considerable remedial attention and one on one tutoring to catch up.

Rehab should never be a vacation from school, and teens need to fulfill their academic responsibilities while in treatment. The rehab should offer trained and experienced educators, able to manage classroom discipline and behavioral issues effectively.

Because the teacher to student ratio can be quite low, students have an excellent opportunity to benefit from individual instruction and catch up to or even surpass peers in conventional school.

4) How much aftercare is offered?

Rehab should never end with the completion of the residential phase of treatment, and equally important to long term success and sobriety is a lengthy participation in aftercare therapies. Aftercare may be group sessions, may be individual therapy and may be a continuation of 12 steps style meetings; and ideally it is a combination of these different therapies. Aftercare helps teens to consolidate and integrate the lessons of rehab when faced with the realities of temptation and real world challenges; and is extremely important for long term sobriety.

Better rehabs will offer a substantial level of aftercare therapy as inclusive in the price of admission, and you should be wary of any teen drug or alcohol rehab that does not promote aftercare after rehab.

By doing a bit of research and getting as much information as possible about the rehabs under consideration, you are in a much better position to choose a program that truly does offer the best treatments, and the best eventual chance of success.

Q1. What does the rehab treatment program actually try to do?

In some parts of the world, rehab treatment is intended to bring people from a higher state of addiction to a lower state of addiction that does not pose as many risks to them. But, in the US, rehab treatment implies a complete abstinence from the substance. The aim of the rehab treatment program in any place within the US is to cure the person completely from the addiction.

Q2. What are the main parts of the rehab treatment program?

There are four main parts to any rehab program. The first part is an analysis of the patient’s condition. This is done through physical tests on the patient as well as interviewing them. These tests indicate how well-suited the patient is to go through the treatment and if other methods of treatment need to be employed. The second stage is the intervention. Here, the patient is convinced to get into treatment. This is usually already done before the patient gets into the rehab center, but there are cases in which people will relapse into denial when they are actually into the rehab center. Hence, the convincing and the motivating become important. This can be done by employing the help of the family of the patient who can be trained on conducting the intervention program in the right manner.

The third part of the program is the detox. The detox is needed in almost all cases that enter for rehab treatment. The main aspect here is to purge the person’s body from the toxins that might have accumulated in it due to the use of the addictive substance. This can be a very long process. Its length will mainly depend on what kind of substance the person is addicted to and the physical and mental situation of the patient.

After the detox, the patient is led through the aftercare program. This is an elaborate program that includes maintenance medication, counseling and group education. There are various therapies taught to the patient which help keep them out of the dependency on the substance.

Q3. Are there any outpatient rehab programs?

The very concept of the rehab treatment program implies that it must be done on an isolated basis where the patient must be removed for a while from all familiar circumstances. Even people who are quite close to the patient are not encouraged to meet them because looking at a familiar person may trigger the temptation for the substance in them, because addiction works in a large way through association. For this reason, it is necessary that the patient lives in the rehab treatment center. That is the reason there are no outpatient rehab programs.

However, there are other kinds of treatment programs that can be provided on an outpatient basis. The outpatient treatment program and the day treatment program are examples of these. Here the patient continues living at home but has to visit the center for a few times a week (daily in the day program) and receive the treatment. If a detox is needed, it is carried out on an outpatient basis too. But, it must be remembered that such a program will work only if the person is in a mild stage of the addiction. For people severely dependent on a substance, inpatient rehab is the best treatment option.

Q4. On what factors will the length of the rehab treatment depend?

People are always quite curious about how much time they will have to spend in the rehab center. Though there is no fixed time for this, it must be said that the length of time will actually depend on how addicted the person is to the substance and the general physical and mental constitution of the patient. The withdrawal that the patient will face will depend on these things and that is what will decide the nature and the duration of the aftercare program. One more factor on which this depends is the type of the substance that the person is addicted too. Someone undergoing a rehab treatment for marijuana addiction will spend much less time at the center than someone for heroin addiction treatment.

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