Unique challenges of women with substance abuse

Women with substance abuse have unique challenges to face than their counter parts with the same condition. Say for example pregnant woman find it struggle some to quit addiction because of severe withdrawal symptoms despite knowing the fact that they would end up troubling or losing their future child. Due to the sociological circumstances, most women endure a gruelling mental and physical pain that their life at some point forces them to find some respite. While some of them find solace in spirituality, some others land themselves in substance abuse to alleviate their pain. Some women end up throwing their life away to substance abuse and never get a second chance to repair and resurrect. All while being revictimized via the stigma surrounding addiction in females. 

Challenges that women addicts face are unique in nature and need vigorous counselling to be dealt with positively. So, what are the unique challenges of women with substance use disorders?

General Challenges

Drugs effect Men and women differently on a physical level. While bad parenting, struggle with partners/children or family disturbances are the three main factors responsible for addiction in women, addicted women in turn cause for themselves, impaired quality of life, an important mental health index that is reduced in women using alcohol and other substances. Women’s use of substances and alcohol most often results in impairment of their psychiatric, social, and economic status. They also experience sudden and unintended losses such as loss of a child to accident, losing children because of delayed medical attention, difficulties in catering to the basic family needs, absent gender roe within the family, loss of social connections due to isolation, evaporated financials to provide for the female’s addiction, children being maltreated in the society and their poor physical and mental development because of a constellation of risks associated with addiction problems. Birth of autistic children due to abuse during pregnancy, being constantly victimised because of immobility caused by after drug effect and emotional, social, psychological, and economical influences on the babies of the female addicts and their family in general. 

Physical challenges

Women with substance abuse are prone to intense gastro-entities that hinders their food intake and makes them weak gradually. Nausea, fatigue, irritability, cravings, after effects of the drug, dehydration and unexplained shivering apart from frequent diarrhoea are common side-effects of dug abuse that impair the quality of a women addict’s life. Because women have many responsibilities including home care, child care and elderly care, these physical challenges are unique to them.  Continuous and severe back pain is one common syndrome that female addicts complain of. Due to the cardiovascular differences between men’s and women’s bodies, women are more likely to experience breathing issues, issues with hearts and blood vessels, intestine infections, kidney damage and liver damage in the long run due to drug abuse, and they are more likely to die from overdose too.

Psychological challenges

Research suggests that as many as two thirds of women with substance misuse problems might be experiencing a concurrent mental health problem, such as depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, panic disorder and/or an eating disorder. It has been established through studies that major proportion of women with addiction problems have been the victims of domestic violence, incest, rape, sexual assault and child physical abuse. Victimisation results in a variety of negative outcomes for women that includes but is not limited to post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, guilt, shame, suicidal ideation and low self-esteem that push them into addiction. Addiction in turn aggravates the already existing psychosis, anxiety disorder, depression and schizophrenia that give hallucinations for the users. 

Pregnancy challenges

Addiction doesn’t discriminate and so effects pregnant women with a range of negative consequences relating to the foetus. Alcohol use during pregnancy, especially in combination with poor nutrition, poor general health, traumatic experiences, co-occurring diseases, and lack of prenatal care, has been found to have devastating effects on both the child and the mother. Depending on the level of addiction, the impact could be so severe that some addicts could not even make it from the pregnancy. 

Of the Stigma and Barriers to Treatment

Societal attitudes towards women’s substance use stand in the forefront of psychosocial influences that create stigma arising from considerable guilt and shame as their substance use/misuse continues and creates barriers to their accessing help. This stigma transverses with structural and financial barriers that arise from experience of cornering, victimisation and mental health problems, fear of having one’s children apprehended, minority status, economic status and rural location, to name but a few. Women often have to deal with mis-information, denial, lack of action and even vindictive attitudes towards their addiction by professionals in a position to intervene, and therefore they may not be established as needing help. 

Mortality

According to Single and colleagues’ analysis of 1995 CIHI data, the estimated number of deaths attributed (fully and partially) to alcohol consumption among hospitalised women was 1,823 or 12.4 per 100,0000 population (among men it was 4,681 or 32.3 per 100,000 population). The greatest number of deaths among women was attributed to motor vehicle accidents (357), alcoholic liver cirrhosis (257), accidental falls (202), breast cancer (192), alcohol dependence syndrome (135) and suicide/self-inflicted injury (134). Research reveals that most percentage of women addicts face mortality at an earlier stage than males due to amplified effects of addicts and overdoses thereof.

Everything said and done, one need not necessarily succumb to addiction. There is definitely a cure available for every kind of addiction. A customised medical intervention coupled with effective counselling is the key to early recovery and maintenance. 

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