Narrative Practices and Adolescents: A Strategy for Substance Abuse Prevention

This paper presents Story Squad: Stories of Substance, a community-based intervention for adolescent substance use prevention. This narrative-based design takes a person-centered approach to prevention and prioritizes the lived experiences and active involvement of young people in developing prevention messages. The article discusses concepts central to contemporary adolescent prevention initiatives, and describes their integration with elements of narrative therapy (NT) and digital storytelling (DST) as a means to engage typically hard to reach adolescents. As illustration, the author describes how Stories of Substance could be implemented within the context of a violence prevention agency.