TREATMENT CONDITIONS

TREATMENT CONDITIONS

Four treatment conditions were employed, three of which included the families of the addicts during treatment. The treatment period (intake to termination) for the three family conditions averaged 41/2 to 5 months in length. The treatment conditions were:

1.    Paid Family Therapy ( n= 21) . At the end of the Family Evaluation Session a contract was made with the family to attend 10 family therapy sessions (brief family therapy) and treatment commenced from that point. In this condition each family mem-ber age 12 and over got $5.00 for attending a session, with a chance to increase the earnings if the addict had been clean that week (see Appendix C for details on the payment procedures). Such payment raised the incentive for members to come to sessions. It also mobilized all family members to put pressure on each other to attend and to put specific pressure on the addict to attend and to abstain from drug use.

2.    Unpaid Family Therapy (n = 25) . Procedures for this group were identical to those for the Paid group except that no money was provided to the family (aside from that given for attending the Family Evaluation Session).

3.    Family Movie Treatment (n = 19). This program re-quired the family to come in once a week for 10 weeks to view 10 different, noncontroversial anthropology movies about people in various foreign cultures. These families were paid and got urinal-ysis reports in the same manner as the Paid Family Therapy group. The Movie condition thus served as a comparison or control for the effects of reimbursement per se and also for the effect on the family of attending weekly sessions together at the clinic.

4.    Nonfamily (methadone and individual counseling) Treat-ment (n= 53). These were addicts in the DDTC who met all of our criteria for inclusion in the study but were not selected for one of the three family-treatment groups. Nothing was said to them about family treatment. Instead they underwent the usual DDTC treatment procedures and received methadone main-tenance, individual counseling, and other services. To be included in the study they had to remain in the methadone program at least 30 days. In comparison with other family-treatment patients, this group provides us with a baseline estimate of the treatment outcomes that can be expected with similar, fairly motivated subjects in an ongoing "standard- multimodal methadone pro-gram.