Substance Use Isn’t the Whole Story, with Dr. Graham Husick
ABOUT THE EPISODE:
Your kid has been to a program. Maybe two. Maybe four. Each one handed back a diagnosis list a little longer than the last, and none of it ever explained why nothing is sticking.
My guest uses a comparison in this one that stopped me cold. If your child had stomach pain, no surgeon would just open them up and look around. They would scan first. And yet with our kids we tend to go straight to treatment, treatment, treatment, without asking who this person actually is underneath the substance use. He calls it treating the problem inside the person instead of the person with the problem, and once you hear it you cannot unhear it.
Dr. Graham Husick is a clinical psychologist in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, and the director of clinical assessment at the Lakeside Independence Program, which works with severe and complex mental health cases. Part of his job is reading the evaluations other people wrote about kids like ours, and he can tell you precisely what keeps getting left out of them.
We get into why he includes IQ testing in every evaluation, what your child's preferred substance choice tells him that they could never say out loud, and why he will usually steer a family toward paying out of pocket rather than running a psych eval through insurance. He also names something I had never heard put into words: why a kid who is finally doing well will sometimes walk straight back into the thing that nearly took them out. I did not have any of this intelligence when my son was in it, and I have thought about that a lot since.
If your child has cycled through program after program and you still cannot answer the question "but what is actually going on with them," start here.
YOU'LL LEARN:
- Why Dr. Husick recommends not testing in active addiction, and the window he actually wants
- What a diagnosis list eight items long tells you, and what it can never tell you
- Why he includes IQ testing every time, even when nobody asked for it
- What the substance your child reaches for most says about what they may be needing
- The recommendation he sometimes has to put in writing that parents least want to read
EPISODE RESOURCES:
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