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.
At RISE23, it was a special time to reflect on the growth and progression in the field of treatment courts through the years. One of the ways that progress comes about is through creative thinking and innovative ideas. While at RISE23, the NDCRC hosted an interactive session titled “The Great Exchange: My Best Idea of the Year” in which we encouraged attendees to share some of their best ideas of the year. This post marks the first in a series of posts sharing the many great ideas that were shared with us. Stay tuned in the following weeks to read about your other great ideas! Let us know what you think about these ideas in the comments, and we encourage you to share your own too.
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 must determine the types of communication relationships or partnerships they currently have with primary stakeholders.” How do you identify your relationships and partnerships? We can help with that. The NDCRC will be releasing “Marketing your Treatment Courts” in May for Treatment Court Month to help you tell the story of the work of treatment courts.
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 to the mix compounds sleep problems exponentially (Vandrey et al. 2014). Recognizing and targeting sleep problems as one dimension of treatment could not only improve health and well-being but may be key to helping people more fully engage in treatment court activities.
What are sleep disorders?
Sleep is essential to our ability to regulate our mood, make wise decisions, avoid accidents, encode and retrieve memories, and learn new things. Treatment court clients are expected to do all these tasks, and not doing so impedes their progress to graduation and blocks long-term recovery. Not all difficulties with sleep meet criteria for a sleep disorder, but sleep disorders affect people with PTSD at much higher rates than the general population. The most common sleep disorder is insomnia, which includes problems with falling asleep, staying asleep, and returning to sleep after waking. Other sleep disorders that commonly occur with trauma are nightmares and obstructive sleep apnea (Coloven et al., 2018).
How are sleep, trauma, and substance use related?
The relationship between substance use and sleep problems is fairly well studied, and treatment court practitioners and providers should be aware of the importance of addressing sleep problems within the process of recovery. Use of stimulants, alcohol, opiates (e.g., too much sleep and insomnia rebound), and marijuana withdrawal all can cause or exacerbate sleep disturbance. The self-medication hypothesis is well supported as well, as people who struggle with sleep may turn to substances to help. Much more research is needed to determine best treatment practices, and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration has published a useful resource to learn more (SAMHSA, 2014; https://store.samhsa.gov/sites/default/files/d7/priv/sma14-4859.pdf)
The impact of trauma on sleep is powerful. Re-experiencing traumatic events often occurs in the form of nightmares, and people become hypervigilant, or intensely on guard against future dangers. Depending on the nature of the trauma, people may have come to associate nighttime, darkness, and sleepiness with extreme vulnerability. We are never more defenseless than when asleep, and people who have experienced trauma form negative expectations and cognitions related to the inevitability of future harms.
There is growing evidence that PTSD, substance use disorders, and sleep disorders are bi-directionally linked (Vandrey et al. 2014).
For example, disordered sleep can make people more susceptible to trauma (e.g. accidents) and more likely to use substances to help them sleep; people with PTSD have symptoms that directly interfere with sleep (e.g. nightmares), and may misuse substances to get relief from both; and people who use or are withdrawing from substances find their sleep is disturbed and can experience heightened PTSD symptoms. Substance use offers quick relief from their distress, but then withdrawal from the same substances leads to sleep disturbance. These are just a sample of the dynamic relationships among these factors, but more research is needed to understand the interplay among them and find effective treatments to address all three factors in concert.
Assessing sleep problems
Whether an individual reports “trouble sleeping” or has a diagnosable sleep disorder, it is important for providers to assess sleep disturbances. While parasomnias (e.g., sleepwalking) and obstructive sleep disordered breathing may require specialists and technologies (e.g., polysomnography) to diagnose, there are validated self-report measures of insomnia that can identify triggers in order to promote use of coping skills direct sleep interventions (see Colvonen, et al. 2018). Sleep diaries are another tool that asks the individual to track their own sleep, recording bedtimes, wake times, sleep latency, night awakenings and total amount of sleep. The data collected can inform not only diagnoses but provide a road map for developing treatment plans. As sleep disturbances do not occur in a vacuum, it is essential also assess trauma symptoms and substance use at the same time.
Treatment of sleep disorders as they co-occur with trauma and substance use
Research shows that treatment of trauma does not necessarily lead to improved sleep, and the same is true for treatment of substance use. Identifying and addressing sleep problems early in treatment may provide several benefits for people with trauma. Since disordered sleep is widely accepted as a common problem, providers may focus on sleep as a “foot in the door” to express empathy for their distress and begin the winding therapeutic pathway forward toward.
Pharmacological interventions can be effective in treating sleep disorders, however there is a risk of misuse that should be considered. Obstructive sleep apnea, narcolepsy, parasomnias, and restless leg syndrome need to be addressed by specialists and generally are not relieved by talk therapies alone. Non-pharmacological therapeutic interventions, at least for insomnia, have been found to be more effective than medications in people with PTSD and substance use disorders (SAMHSA 2014; Colvonen et al., 2018; Vandrey et al., 2014).
Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I), is a brief (6-8 sessions) approach comprised of well-supported behavioral interventions like restricting sleep, stimulus control, such as structuring the environment to be more conducive to quality sleep. It also integrates cognitive therapies that target negative thoughts about sleep and other dysfunctional beliefs that interfere with sleep. The approach is heavily researched and is endorsed by the Department of Veteran’s Affairs (VA) and the American College of Physicians as a first line of treatment for insomnia-even as it co-occurs with PTSD. The manualized intervention can be administered with individuals or groups, and there are mobile technologies such as apps that supplement in-person treatment (e.g., the VA’s CBT-i Coach). Imagery Rehearsal Therapy, or IRT has shown promise in the treatment of nightmares in PTSD. A cognitive therapy, IRT involves “re-writing” of recurrent nightmares to make them less distressing and repeatedly imagining and rehearsing the new scenarios to make them less potent (Colvonen et al., 2018).
What Treatment Courts Can Do
Improving sleep in treatment court participants can potentially impact the cognitive, emotional and physical impairments that interfere with recovery. Participants could engage more fully in treatments for PTSD and other mental health struggles, as well as substance use interventions, improving the chances of successful recovery.
By design, the judicial system wields disconnection as a tool to gain compliance, police behavior, and execute punishment. Rules are standardized, personal histories often remain unconsidered, change is sought through punitive means, and people are, quite literally, numbers. Arguably, the dehumanization inherent in this approach perpetuates, at least in part, the very social problems it seeks to address.