Beyond The Field

Treatment Court work is challenging, interesting, and rewarding. However, recovery is a long road, and it can take a long time before participants start to see lasting changes, as they work to acquire essential knowledge and skills. This can be frustrating for everyone. Frankly, all that listening that treatment court programming requires can get a bit, well, boring. What’s the best way to “supercharge” that process? Decades of research supports the Chinese proverb “I hear I forget, I see I remember, I do, and I understand.” The more we can engage participants not just through their brains but through doing,...

Treatment Court work is challenging, interesting, and rewarding. However, recovery is a long road, and it can take a long time before participants start to see lasting changes, as they work to acquire essential knowledge and skills. This can be frustrating for everyone. Frankly, all that listening that treatment court programming requires can get a bit, well, boring. What’s the best way to “supercharge” that process? Decades of research supports the Chinese proverb “I hear I forget, I see I remember, I do, and I understand.” The more we can engage participants not just through their brains but through doing,...

The negative impact of parental substance use on children’s well-being is well documented within the literature. Family Treatment Courts (FTCs) specifically aim to provide parents involved with the child welfare system with access to clinical treatment and recovery support services in an effort to enhance family functioning and help families stay together and thrive. However, a large percentage of participants in all types of treatment court programs have children (or serve in the role of parent/guardian). As a result, these participants could benefit from enhancing their knowledge and skills within the area of parenting.  

Question: who should know about treatment courts? Answer: everyone, right? While everyone should know about the work and benefits of treatment courts, how we communicate with specific audiences – which we call stakeholders – must be tailored to their role, location, and function. This means that a message to a legislator inviting them to a drug court graduation would be different than a press release announcing the treatment court graduation to the media. The logistical information may be the same but the “so what?” varies across stakeholder groups. According to Ulmer, Sellnow and Seeger (2019), “To communicate more effectively, organizations...

Statistics Are you one of the 70 million people in the U.S who experience sleep problems? About one-third of adults get fewer than 7 hours of sleep and report symptoms of insomnia. About 10% of adults at any given time meet the criteria for insomnia disorder, reporting ongoing difficulty getting to sleep, staying asleep, and/or returning to sleep that results in problems with functioning. Another common sleep disorder is sleep apnea (about 10% of adults), in which the person stops and starts breathing again many times during sleep. Sleep apneas can lead to life threatening conditions and requires formal assessment...

This is the fifth in our Beyond the Field series of articles that explore trauma and its impact on treatment court work. Treatment court participants can face challenges including complex health problems, poverty, discrimination, substance use, trauma, just to name a few. As a result, poor sleep may not rise to the top of the list of issues to address with individuals. Yet sleep disturbances underlie many of the physical, cognitive, and emotional struggles that can derail recovery. Over 80% of people who have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) also have a sleep disorder, and adding substance use...