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The current study highlights the value of staff training, human resource capacity building, technical support, and financial resources to provide contraception and other sexual health services. A developed and integrated assistance system that pays attention to and targets women’s concerns has tangible benefits. Valuable findings include indications that strengthening organizational capacity and human resources, adequate technical support, access to financial resources, and public acceptance of these needs and changes in perceptions of women are critical factors for change 21. This study suggests that for recovering drug users, treatment services must focus on the social environment of their clients after leaving treatment. It also suggests that social services can do more to prevent women from using drugs by providing greater access to needed resources in their social environment, and intervention services for women drug users can acknowledge the social context where the women live when developing their programs.

Differences in Addiction Treatment

Specifically, idealized weight was a common reason that the women turned to methamphetamine when they felt that they were not meeting social expectations of the perfect female shape. The services needed are not as accessible as many think due to the stigmatization of those who apply for aid. Boeri, Tyndall, and Woodall (2011) show how the barriers to services that women need to help themselves improve their lives can be a reason why women use or continue to use drugs.

This brings up the theory that ovarian steroid hormones may influence the behavioral effect of drugs 34. Also, women exhibit greater withdrawal response with abstinence compared to men and tend to exhibit relapse due to cue-induced craving more than men suggesting that there might be sex differences in stress reactivity and relapse to drug use 55. Many of the women had expressed similar fear of losing their children or distress after losing them and having a difficult time what are wippets regaining custody. Being a drug user prevents these women from fulfilling an acceptable mother role even though some effectively provided and cared for their children while using drugs. Society says they are not fit to be mothers, but it offers little help to meet the high standards set.

Chloe stopped using drugs when she was in a relationship with a boyfriend who disapproved of drug use. The study was approved by the university’s Institutional Review Board and received a “certificate of confidentiality” from a federal agency to protect the study data. The audio-recorded interviews were semi-structured and open-ended so that participants could also lead the conversation into new areas of interest. The content is solely the responsibility of the author and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

Substance Use Disorders in Women

This concept of self-medication relates to the situations that the women faced that motivates them turn to drugs as a coping mechanism. Other women turn to drugs to try to improve or fix their situation and “cure” themselves—to feel normal. The data used for the analysis in this paper was drawn from a larger study on women who use methamphetamine conducted by Boeri (2013).1 Female methamphetamine users were drawn from the suburban counties outside a large city in southeastern USA. Participants were recruited using a combination of snowball, targeted and theoretical sampling methods (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Strauss & Corbin 1998; Watters & Biernacki 1989). Snowball sampling, also called chain referral, involved asking participants and interested inquirers to refer another potential participant to the study. Targeted sampling involved ethnographic fieldwork in communities where drug use was prevalent and establishing relationships with community members to reach potential participants.

1. In both cases, the women began the use of drugs to avoid the stigma they faced in their current lives.
2. Finding that some women used drugs to manage the stigma they felt as being poor or to cope with feelings of hopelessness before their drug use started, led to conceptualizing the stages of drug use.
3. For example, referring to “overdose prevention sites” rather than “safe consumption sites” leads to increased public support for an evidence-based harm reduction strategy wherein individuals can legally use pre-obtained drugs under medical supervision to reduce risk of overdose (Barry et al., 2018).
4. Anger and hostility mediate the association between experienced stigma and substance use among African American adolescents and their parents, respectively (Gibbons et al., 2010).
5. The National Institute on Drug Abuse reports that every 15 minutes, a baby is born with opioid withdrawal.

Definitions, Key Concepts, and Processes

The most important aspects seem to be drug policy changes, especially in Georgia, where current policy in this area–as the study authors suggest–maintains the sociocultural conditioning of negative attitudes toward drug users-especially toward women. The extreme marginalization of this group is both a barrier for women suffering from drug abuse to make any attempt at treatment and a severe challenge for policymakers 29. The same is true, by the way, in African countries, including Tanzania, where fear of social consequences, violence against women, and low access to prevention and treatment services seem to be more of a challenge than a need 38, especially since research and prevention initiatives seem to be rare in that country 41. Another African country where helping women who abuse drugs seems to be a challenge for policymakers is Kenya. Here, the authors of the research analyzed point to the need to change social norms in the perception of women 21, without which proper assistance is hardly possible, as the existing perception of this disadvantaged group promotes isolation, exclusion, discrimination, and stigma in health care facilities 19.

Informed by the literature, this study examined the lives of 20 women who used methamphetamine and other illegal drugs with the goal to understand every stage of their drug use, and with particular focus on barriers to recovery. Using a qualitative method known as “grounded theory” (Charmaz, 2006), the study examined how female drug users begin using drugs and how they strive to achieve a sense of normality while facing stigmatization as current or former drug users. These stigma manifestations, in turn, reinforce and sustain stigma (Earnshaw et al., 2013; Link & Phelan, 2001). At the structural level, stigma is manifested within societal-level conditions, cultural norms, and institutional policies (Hatzenbuehler & symptoms of roofied Link, 2014).

Substance Use in Women Research Report

Among targets, social support and adaptive coping have received attention as resources that buffer targets from the deleterious effects of stigma on health (Earnshaw et al. 2015; Earnshaw et al., 2013). For example, youth experiencing race-based bullying are less likely to initiate smoking if they have at least one adult at school from whom they receive support (Earnshaw et al., 2014). Research has also identified personality characteristics (e.g., spiritual peace, self-efficacy, optimism), as resilience resources with promise to promote well-being among targets (Dulin et al., 2018). Many of these resources block the effects of enacted and anticipated stigma on negative psychological responses to stigma, such as stress and depressive symptoms, that ultimately lead to substance use outcomes. These stigma manifestations may also be experienced as associative substance use group ideas stigma by individuals who are affiliated with others living with stigmatized statuses.