The Association between Trauma History, Trauma-Related Psychopathology and Treatment Completion at an Adolescent Inpatient Substance Abuse Treatment Center in Turkey

Some adolescents are at great risk for early attrition from inpatient substance abuse treatment. We aimed to examine the effect of sociodemographic features, substance use patterns, childhood traumas and trauma-related psychopathology on the completion of an adolescent substance abuse inpatient treatment program in order to acquire information about adapting treatment strategies to enhance patient retention. Our study included 105 adolescents who were referred with a diagnosis of substance use disorder to our Child and Adolescent Substance Abuse Treatment Center’s inpatient treatment program in Istanbul, Turkey from February to December 2017. The Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia for School-Age Children-Present and Lifetime Version, the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale, the Conners-Wells Adolescent Self Report Scale, the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire, the Childhood Abuse and Neglect Question List, the Dependency Profile Index-Practitioner Form and the Adolescent Dissociative Experiences Scale were administered to the study group. The treatment completion rate was 26.7%. The patients who did not complete the inpatient treatment program had more history of childhood emotional neglect and/or abuse. The most common type of psychosocial trauma was emotional neglect (34%). Early attrition from the inpatient treatment program was related to dissociative amnesia, more severe attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, depression and synthetic cannabinoids use (p < 0.05). Our findings indicate that childhood psychosocial trauma and related clinical characteristics were associated with attrition from the adolescent inpatient substance abuse treatment program. Substance abuse treatment programs should adopt early assessment tools to identify those at risk for early attrition from treatment and provide targeted interventions for them.