Adolescent Alternatives

Located in Redwood City, CA, Adolescent Alternatives operates in CA's broader addiction-treatment market. The facility's programming is outpatient (Outpatient, Dual Dx), not residential. What this page tries to do is frame the specific questions worth asking, which are rarely the ones that get asked first.

Care levels at Adolescent Alternatives

Adolescent Alternatives is an outpatient-focused program (Outpatient, Dual Dx) — patients live at home or in sober living and attend treatment sessions. This level of care is clinically appropriate for mild-to-moderate substance use disorder, or for patients stepping down from residential. The level-of-care question is where a lot of misaligned placements happen — a patient who needs residential ends up in IOP, or vice versa. The protection is a clinical assessment outside the facility's admissions team.

Insurance and payment

Payment and insurance specifics for Adolescent Alternatives are not fully documented in the SAMHSA registry — a direct admissions conversation is the reliable way to confirm what forms of payment are accepted and at what network-contract level. The uncomfortable truth about insurance at most treatment centers is that admissions staff and the utilization-review team sometimes have different understandings of what was promised. Written VOB forces those understandings into alignment.

Specialty programming

The facility's documented specialty programming includes: Young adults, Criminal justice (other than DUI/DWI)/Forensic clients, Clients with co-occurring mental and substance use disorders. "Specialty track" is a marketing category often; it becomes a clinical category when specific clinicians deliver specific programming for a documented number of hours per week. Ask for those specifics.

Before you call

Three questions for Adolescent Alternatives before you sign anything: what ASAM level you are being admitted at; what the written VOB says for your plan; how the program handles MAT. If the clinical situation involves opioid use disorder, confirm explicitly whether Adolescent Alternatives offers medication-assisted treatment — buprenorphine, methadone, or naltrexone. Programs that do not are operating outside the current standard of care. These three together tell you most of what a facility's about.