Watching Bad Scene Get Worse

What parents may only suspect about the secret lives of their teenage children, Kate Pavich knows.

She spends most of her working week listening to their earnest tales of drug hunger and alienation. As a seasoned substance abuse counselor for the Orange County Health Care Agency, Pavich has pretty much heard it all. But after more than 20 years working with children of all ages, she has never been more concerned.

“The kids now are much more depressed, they’re much less hopeful and they’re much more self-destructive,” said Pavich, who works with middle and high school students in south Orange County. “They feel very trapped. They don’t have role models. There is an assignment on heroes I do with them. I ask them, ‘Who are your heroes?’ They are hard-pressed to come up with anyone that they look up to.

“They’ve got parents who are not available emotionally, in terms of their time. And they get stigmatized very early as bad kids because they are poor learners, or have family troubles, or they are involved with drugs. They tend to get stuck in this box of the bad kid, and they will be very good at being very bad.”

Teenagers are willing to ingest an alarming variety of substances these days, Pavich said, including the current fad drug: heroin. And they pay little attention to the warnings of adults.

“Kids will see their friends die, they’ll overdose. We had a kid at one of the high schools die this year of a heroin overdose, but it doesn’t stop them. I can sit there and tell them all the stuff, show them the videos, they can even hear it from their friends. But until they experience the downside of the drugs, they’re mostly unwilling to believe what I’m saying to them.

“The Centers for Disease Control talks about drug fads being in five-year cycles. Everybody was into crystal meth, but now we’ve pretty much gotten over the methamphetamine phase. Now they’re doing what they call ‘cheeva,’ which is heroin,” Pavich said. “I have a lot of kids that I never, ever thought would be doing heroin. They’re not shooting it, they do what they call ‘drips.’ They put it in a little nasal dropper and stick it in their noses. It goes right to the brain. All my high-school age kids are doing it.”

Alcohol abuse continues to be strong, Pavich said. And teenagers at most public high school campuses have easy access to a diverse menu of drugs: a potent, genetically engineered form of marijuana called “crip”; a mixture of speed and hallucinogenic drugs known as “ecstasy”; a liquid LSD that young concert-goers dispense from spray bottles; nitrous oxide, and inhalants from aerosol cans.

“Kids will get the little aerosol cleaners for cameras and inhale those, because they have Freon in them. At one of the South County high schools, I had a kid come into a group counseling session and his hands were a mess. I said, ‘My God, what did you do to your hands?’ It was frostbite from holding a valve open on the school’s air conditioning system while he inhaled the Freon. His hands looked like hamburger. A lot of the schools now have barriers that they put around the air conditioning units.”

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Pavich meets with troubled students individually and in groups on school campuses. Twenty-eight of her students graduated from high school this month, a major accomplishment, she says, considering how torn apart some of their families are.

“Parents are very uninvolved in their kids’ lives. I had a kid for example who got a tongue ring. I’ve got kids who have multiple piercings, multiple tattoos, and their parents never know. These parents will come in to see me and they’ll be in complete denial that their kid has a drug problem. And I’ve already talked to this kid and I know he’s in major trouble. The parent will say, ‘Well, they might have tried it once or twice.’ They are really in denial about any of the symptoms. They don’t really want to know.

“Some of these parents use drugs themselves. And a lot of them are just involved in other things. They’ll say, ‘My kid’s a teenager, they don’t need to be cared for, nurtured, watched, structured. They’re on their own. So if the kids can act like they are OK on their own, why should I mess things up by getting involved?’ ”

Pavich advises parents to take part in their teenagers’ lives, watch for warning signs and seek help early on.

“The hardest darn thing that we have to do as parents is to set limits. It is so much easier to walk away, but it’s a gift that we can give our children. If they know we care and we can set limits, we’ve given them what they need.

“I ask parents if they are awake when their kid comes home at night. Many times they’re not. But if a kid comes in under the influence and the parents are awake, they’re going to know something’s up. They’re going to smell the breath, they’re going to see the eyes, they’re going to watch how they walk, they’re going to listen to their speech. They’re going to know there is something going on. But most of these parents do not stay up. We have lots of them who pride themselves on being really cool parents, and it’s really a problem.”

During counseling sessions, Pavich encourages parents and children to create a contract, so that both sides learn to accept responsibility. But it takes time. Pavich said the barrier between teens and adults has never been stronger.

“The kids are pushing the envelope. They are taking more and more risks and they are in incredible denial that anything bad will happen to them. We had a rash of bad acid that was going around, a lot of strychnine in it. Kids were having really serious problems, but they would sit here and say, ‘I’ll be cool with that. I can handle it.’ They feel omnipotent at this age. And they’re not.”

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Profile:

Kate Pavich

Hometown: Orange

Residence: Laguna Niguel

Family: 19-year-old daughter

Education: Bachelor’s degree in psychology, Cal State Fullerton; master’s degree in counseling, Cal State Long Beach; teaching credentials in various specialties including early childhood education; a licensed marriage, family and child counselor

Background: Coordinated programs for disadvantaged children with Fullerton recreation department; on-campus preschool program coordinator at UC Irvine, UCLA and Orange Coast College; program director for special-needs children and parents in Irvine Unified School District; preschool teacher and counselor; joined Orange County Health Care Agency in 1988 as children’s mental health specialist; helped initiate South County adolescent drug-abuse program in 1989

Currently: Coordinates teenage drug abuse programs for South County middle and high school students; runs group counseling sessions with teens on campus

On building trust: “Because we are bound by federal confidentiality laws, parents cannot call up and find out what their son or daughter said in a counseling session--neither can the school. They are all pretty good at trusting that we’re going to help manage these kids, even though we all know they are doing things that are illegal.”

Source: Kate Pavich; Researched by RUSS LOAR / For The Times