Addiction and the Stages of Use

• What levels of use are there?
• How do I know which level of use my client is in?
• Do people bounce around in use stages or move in a linear fashion?

Stages of use are helpful in assessing your client’s use and  determining when you should be concerned about someone’s use. It also helps direct our interventions so that we can tailor them more effectively. 

In this Podcast: 

• The stages of use are no use, experimentation, misuse, abuse and dependence
• When assessing, you are looking for the age at which a person entered into each phase and also looking at what stage they are in currently
• As with mental health disorders we are looking for patterns and events that caused changes or increase in substance use
• Current stage of use helps you know whether you are looking at prevention or intervention 
• The stages of use pulls from episode 7 where we talked about changes in the brain and how it impacts behavior.