How do you actually help the contemplative teen?

Working with young people is not an easy job, working with young people with substance use issues and challenging behaviours is even tougher. As workers we have to be creative and resourceful when it comes to engaging young people to engage with us. Orygen has this great resource that looks at some of the barriers we might experience when trying to engage a young person with challenging behaviours.

There are many stages to a young person’s desire to change their substance use, some want to stop NOW, others want to reduce their use and eventually stop and then there are some who are only seeing you because their parents/ school/ friend told them to.