Recruitment into Treatment of Homeless,Mentally Ill,Chemical Abusing Men

Abstract

Under the assumption that the treatment of substance abuse begins well before substance abusers actually enroll in treatment, this paper conceptualizes the process of recruitment into treatment, and investigates attrition of treatment seeking clients during the treatment recruitment stage. The paper identifies two stages prior to treatment enrollment, treatment exploration and treatment recruitment, and presents the results of a study of 1,924 homeless, mentally ill, chemical abusing men who looked for community-based treatment in New York City between 1991 and 1996. Only 326 of these men actually entered treatment. The rest were lost either prior to or during the recruitment stage. The paper focuses on the 823 men who reached the treatment recruitment stage, and attempts to correlate their sociodemographic, psychological, and substance abuse characteristics with the different types of attrition during treatment recruitment. The results show that certain client characteristics predict rejection and certain other characteristics predict acceptance by the treatment programs.