PS497 Unit 10 Addictions Capstone Reflection Example

What the Capstone Asked of Every Course: A PS497 Unit 10 Capstone Reflection

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

PS497: Bachelor's Capstone in Addiction

Unit 10 Capstone Reflection

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer, the program and the clients are composite; the articles cited are real.

Where the Project Started

Six months ago, my capstone was a feeling: frustration that clients like Wes did well in our Boise program's intensive treatment and then fell apart after graduation. The project turned that feeling into a question, a design and a plan to find out whether the design works. Looking back, each step asked me to use something the addictions concentration taught, often in ways I did not expect.

Seeing Addiction as Chronic

The idea underneath the whole project came from McLellan et al. (2000), who compared drug dependence with diabetes, hypertension and asthma and argued for ongoing care. I had read the article in my first addictions course and agreed with it, but I had not let it change how I saw graduation day. The capstone did. I now think of the end of intensive treatment as a transition into a riskier period, not a finish line.

Formulation and Relapse

Writing Wes's case formulation taught me to separate what starts a problem from what keeps it going, and Witkiewitz and Marlatt's (2004) dynamic model of relapse helped me understand why his relapse came when it did: many small changes, the end of structure, back pain, a garage full of beer, an argument with his son, pushing a system past its tipping point. That way of thinking now shapes how I talk with clients about their own high-risk times.

The habit the concentration gave me was asking what keeps a problem going, not only what started it.

Ethics That Changed the Design

The ethics unit changed the project more than I expected. Huckvale et al. (2019) found that many health apps shared data with third parties, often without telling users. Before reading that study, I would have recommended a popular app. After it, I insisted on a secure platform under contract and dropped location tracking. I learned that ethics is not a review at the end; it is the series of choices that decides what gets built.

Listening to Clients and Staff

The design improved every time someone told me it would not work for them. Rosa's shared phone, Hank's hill and the counselors' Sunday nights each produced a feature I would not have thought of. The concentration taught me about cultural responsiveness, but the capstone taught me that it starts with asking and then changing something.

From Case Manager to Designer

The biggest shift was in how I see my own role. Case management means solving problems for one client at a time: a bus pass, an insurance appeal, a missed appointment. The capstone asked me to see a pattern across many clients and design something that would change it for all of them. That required skills I had studied but rarely used together: reading research critically, writing a budget, presenting to a clinical director and accepting criticism from counselors who knew their workload better than I did. I found that I enjoy this kind of work, and that I am better at it when I stay close to individual clients' stories. Wes's three weeks kept the project honest whenever it drifted toward technology for its own sake.

What I Still Find Hard

Evaluation is the skill I am least confident in. I can write measures and decision rules, but I struggled to accept that a twenty-client pilot cannot prove anything, and I kept wanting to describe what we would find before we found it. My clinical director pointed out that the most valuable part of the evaluation plan might be the rule telling us to stop if engagement falls. I am still learning to value a design that could show my idea failing.

Next Steps

The pilot begins in the spring, pending the privacy review. Within a year I plan to apply to an accredited counseling master's program, so that I can work toward licensure and an addictions credential. I also plan to record lessons from the pilot in a running log, including what goes wrong, and to share it with the counselors who will run it, so that the next version rests on results, not on my hopes.

Conclusion

The capstone used nearly every part of the addictions concentration: McLellan and colleagues' view of addiction as chronic, Witkiewitz and Marlatt's model of relapse, Huckvale and colleagues' warning about app privacy and the lessons of clients who did not fit my plans. I leave with stronger skills in formulation, ethics and design, an honest weakness in evaluation and a pilot that will test whether the weeks after graduation can be made safer.

References

Huckvale, K., Torous, J., & Larsen, M. E. (2019). Assessment of the data sharing and privacy practices of smartphone apps for depression and smoking cessation. JAMA Network Open, 2(4), Article e192542. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2019.2542

McLellan, A. T., Lewis, D. C., O'Brien, C. P., & Kleber, H. D. (2000). Drug dependence, a chronic medical illness: Implications for treatment, insurance, and outcomes evaluation. JAMA, 284(13), 1689-1695. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.284.13.1689

Witkiewitz, K., & Marlatt, G. A. (2004). Relapse prevention for alcohol and drug problems: That was Zen, this is Tao. American Psychologist, 59(4), 224-235. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.59.4.224