For the considered outcomes, it seems that adding any psychosocial support to standard maintenance treatments do not add additional benefits. Data do not show differences also for contingency approaches, contrary to all expectations. Duration of the studies was too short to analyse relevant outcomes such as mortality. It should be noted that the control intervention used in the studies included in the review on maintenance treatments, is a program that routinely offers counselling sessions in addition to methadone; thus the review, actually, did not evaluate the question of whether any ancillary psychosocial intervention is needed when methadone maintenance is provided, but the narrower question of whether a specific more structured intervention provides any additional benefit to a standard psychosocial support. These interventions probably can be measured and evaluated by employing diverse criteria for evaluating treatment outcomes, aimed to rigorously assess changes in emotional, interpersonal, vocational and physical health areas of life functioning.
Visual representation tools for improving addiction treatment outcomes.
To examine the effectiveness of two visual representation counseling techniques for reducing illicit drug use, participants were randomly assigned to receive standard treatment "as usual" or standard treatment supplemented with free mapping or free plus guide mapping. Each counselor delivered all types of treatment to participants to control for differences in counselor characteristics (e.g., experience, empathy). Eighty-two participants who had received one year of methadone maintenance treatment and had urinalysis and self-report data for illicit drug use six months after treatment were examined. Compared to participants receiving standard treatment, participants randomly assigned to the free plus guide mapping condition had significantly lower opiate use based on urinalysis and self-report data. These results support the use of the free plus guide visual representation strategy and provide evidence for the concurrent validity of self-report measures of illicit drug use.