After completing the detox phase, the patient is interviewed by a psychotherapist, who also explains Sunset Bay Academy’s treatment program and answers all the questions the teen might have about his/her recovery process.

The in-depth diagnostic interview enables the therapist to understand the teen’s addiction patterns and behaviors in greater detail. The therapist gets a complete picture of the patient’s psychological makeup after compiling data from the patient’s clinical observation, careful evaluation, and current state. This allows the therapist to detect areas of the teen’s personality that offer an opportunity for improvement.

This phase of the program plays a key role in determining the recovery process, for it allows the clinicians to understand each teen’s personal history and how the drug use and/or addiction began. This thorough knowledge of the patient permits our team of health professionals to design a unique treatment that best helps the teen’s recovery.

Our medical staff at Sunset Bay Academy uses the safest and most reliable medical drugs that do not produce any subjective symptoms in the patients. Using this system, eliminates the effects of intoxication of various dangerous drugs still affecting the teen, without the risk of making the patient chemically dependent to the treatment substances. This safe approach to detox promotes the quick termination of the abstinence phase and shortens its length.

Before the administration of medical substances, our doctors make sure they thoroughly know the teen’s particular characteristics, their history of drug consumption, patterns of abuse and the effects the teen suffered from drug use. In cases where patients arrive to our facility without showing any abstinence symptoms, our medical staff administrates a pharmacological strategy necessary to diminish any withdrawal symptoms the patient may have.

Even though psychological treatment is not employed in this phase of the program, during the teen’s detox phase certain psychological techniques are used. Observation and clinical monitoring will yield important information to the clinicians that will help them tailor the unique treatment your teen will require.

There are major areas that our health professionals evaluate in order to make a precise and accurate diagnosis:

• Specific diagnosis of drug abuse.
  
• Exploration and detection of clinical disorders (such as teen depression, anxiety, impulse-control disorders, etc.)
• Personality disorders
• Medical conditions
• Psychosocial and Environmental problems that may be affecting the teen.
  

In addition to these in-depth interviews, we gather relevant information about the teen’s behavior patterns by means of observation and non verbal communication. Our clinicians make sure to collect data from the patient’s parents or guardians, more than relying on the teen’s verbal responses during the initial interviews. By using this procedure, information is much more trustworthy, this allows our professionals to make an accurate diagnosis.