Mary was a girl who used any drugs she could get. Cocaine, alcohol, marijuana, meth – whatever was available: "I never said ‘No’." At one point, she hated her life, had a bad attitude, and refused to face her problems. All of this changed over the course of one year, thanks to the Adolescent Substance Abuse Treatment Program, or ASAT, a local program that is a part of Adolescent Counseling Services.

Now a 17-year-old, Mary, who asked that her last name not be used, is but one of the many teens that ASAT has helped over its 15 years of service to the Palo Alto community.

"I didn’t want to be here, but I am so glad I was," Mary said.

The Palo Alto Unified School District alone referred "from 20 to 25 teens in just the last five months," according to Brenda Stern, ASAT’s program director.

According to its annual report, ASAT has played a role in improving the lives of 283 clients this year alone through its professional assessments and intensive treatment. A state certified outpatient treatment program, ASAT helps 12- to 18-year-old adolescents who abuse drugs and/or alcohol.

"We are motivational, supportive, and in no way punitive," Stern said. "We are here to help."

According to Stern, ASAT uses the Adolescent Community Reinforcement Approach, which relies heavily upon family participation.

"It really takes a lot of support to recover, so if a teen’s parents are not even involved, that’s really not the best way to help them," Stern said.

The process begins when a member of the community, usually a doctor, a psychiatrist, a therapist, a school, or the teen’s parents refers him or her to ASAT.

According to one of ASAT’s informational brochures, the first step in the program is assessment, where treatment professionals evaluate the level of "use, misuse, abuse, and dependence of substances, a depression index, suicidal ideations, self-esteem and other emotional disturbances."

According to the brochure, the assessment is split into three parts. The first session is with the parents and the teen, and covers family history and previous medical conditions, along with other current issues.

The second session is a meeting alone with the adolescent, and includes drug history information and an assessment of levels of depression, suicidal ideations, self-esteem, stress, and other issues of conflict.

In the third and final session, the professionals give their recommendations based on their assessments from the previous two meetings to the adolescent and his or her parents.

According to Stern, the cost of the assessment is $300, but since ASAT and ACS are contracted with PAUSD, if the teen is referred by PAUSD, the assessment is free to the student and his or her family.

After the assessment, ASAT either admits the teen into its outpatient treatment program, refers him or her to a residential treatment facility elsewhere, or refers him or her to counseling either at school or elsewhere.

In ASAT’s outpatient treatment program, the teen attends one individual session per week, one peer group session per week, one family therapy session per week, and two 12-step meetings (such as Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics-Anonymous, etc.) per week. According to Stern, this basic outline is personalized to each adolescent and revised every 30 days.

The teens also undergo one or two urinalyses per week to ensure their abstinence from drugs and alcohol.

According to Stern, along with their discussions, the teens also learn coping strategies, problem solving skills, time management skills, communication skills, drug and alcohol education, and learn other skills that their drug and alcohol abuse may have affected.

The teens are not the only ones who have meetings to attend. ASAT believes that the family unit plays a very important role in the teen’s recovery, so the teen’s parents attend meetings as well. There are usually one or more parent group meetings per week, one multi-family meeting per month (in which the teens are involved as well), and also the two 12-step meetings.

Stern stresses that ASAT is not judgmental of the people it treats. "Substance abuse is not about the substance," Stern said. "What is important are the underlying reasons for the abuse. The reasons for the teens’ abuse are that they are coping and self-medicating, so the drug they choose doesn’t really matter. We care very deeply about these teens, and we understand them even when their parents sometimes don’t."

ASAT accepts outpatient clients from anywhere into their program, although the majority of its teens are from Palo Alto. Over the course of the treatment program, which is usually a minimum of 90 days, ASAT seeks to help and educate its teens, and also rebuild their trust with their families.

"A lot of the time the problem is a communication or trust issue," Stern said.

Although ASAT seeks to do good for the teens and the community, it faces its fair share of problems.

"It amazes me," Stern said, "but the biggest problem we face here at ASAT is that since treatment programs sometimes have a social stigma, there are parents who are in denial of the fact that their teens need help; they think that they can just get through it on their own. A person who is constantly under the influence can get very hopeless, and although people think that it’s about willpower, it’s really not."

Despite this and other setbacks, ASAT improves the lives of hundreds of teens each year through their whole-family approach to treatment. Mary, who went through ASAT, has been sober for two years.

"Teenagers need a lot more structure than they know, and ASAT gave me the structure to move on and move forward with a healthy lifestyle and good boundaries," Mary said.

To learn more about ASAT, visit www.acs-teens.org, call their number at (650) 329-9410, or visit them at 445 Sherman Avenue, Suite J.