The Rise and Fall of the Arkadia Clinic: The Development of Pioneering Services for Drug-Using Youth in Finland, 1960s–1980s

Finland witnessed an increase in youth drug use in the latter half
of the 1960s. The Finnish social and health care sectors were not prepared
for this. This article takes a closer look at the development of outpatient
treatment services and asks what the experimental phase of services was
like. The focus is on the first outpatient treatment center developed specifically for young people. The assumed experiences of young people were the
basis for the operations of the Arkadia Clinic. They also led to its eventual demise, portrayed in the media as anarchism, which lost the support of potential funders. Studying the Arkadia Clinic serves to reveal the role of radical pioneers as activists succeeding in expressing the need for change and
facilitating it but failing to achieve the permanent collaboration and maintenance required to maintain services