Intervention details
Psychoactive Substance users - All Ages, including poly-substance users and NPS users.
Recreational environments security staff; professionals of health, social and emergency services; Police officers; Peers
Staff training, guidelines for cooperation with medical and security staff, crisis intervention strategies in situations of unsupervised use of psychedelics, nursing, hydration, safe place to rest and chill, sitting, process and outcome evaluation, psychiatric assessment, homeopathy, etc.
The project relies on intervention principles drawn from Harm Reduction practice, crisis intervention models (Roberts, 1990) and Stanislav Grof's Psychedelic Psychotherapy approach, particularly his conceptualization of crisis intervention in situations related to unsupervised use of psychedelics (Grof, 2008). KC evaluation research has been designed and implemented aiming to contribute to the transformation of the project into an evidence-based intervention model. Intervention was expected to produce knowledge about the relation between substance use and mental health impact in reducing potential risk related to the use of psychoactive substances and mental illness, as well as an impact upon target population's views of themselves, their relationship to substance use, and to life events in general. Research includes data on process and outcome indicators through a mixed methods approach. A pretest posttest design, with a twelve-month to two-year follow-up, without a control group, was used in this study, was inspired by program evaluation methodology, including procedures for evaluating process and outcome indicators, gathered through the collection of quantitative or qualitative indicators through an assessment protocol consisting of several form measures, implemented in a naturalistic unconventional intervention and research setting - a recreational environment - in 2010 and 2012. A mixed methods approach that enabled the collection or analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data was used next to sample of n=176 participants gathered among a total group of N=324 Visitors in both years, for follow-up purposes. Quantitative data where analyzed with PASW 18 software. QSR NVIVO 9 software was used for qualitative data analysis.
Nursing equipment and instruments; prescription pharmaceuticals; specially designed safe space to accommodate up to 35/40 people at a time.
Evaluation details
Staff training, crisis intervention strategies, team satisfaction, visitor satisfaction, visitor follow-up
Consult avaiable in this paper: CARVALHO, M. Carmo... [et al.] - Crisis intervention related to the use of psychoactive substances in recreational settings - Evaluating the Kosmicare Project at Boom Festival. Current Drug Abuse Reviews. ISSN 1874-4745. Vol. 7 (2) (2014), p. 81-200
