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Overdose Deaths Increased in Pregnant and Postpartum Women From Early 2018 to Late 2021
Drug overdose deaths rose markedly between January to June 2018 and July to December 2021 among 10- to 44-year-old girls and women who were pregnant or pregnant within the previous 12 months, according to a new study by researchers at National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) at the National...
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Inequality in the Effects of Disaster Trauma in Women
Over the past decade, the U.S. has seen an increase in large scale disasters both man-made and natural, from 9-11-01, the Virginia Tech and the Fort Hood Shootings to Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Ike. These events have the potential to create states of acute emotional distress in people who are...
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Trauma Assessment for Women Receiving Mental Health Services
The National Institute of Mental Health states that in any given year 25% of adults in the United States are diagnosable for one or more mental disorders. Of that 25%, 6% meet the criteria for severe mental illness. Women are not more likely to meet the criteria for a diagnosis however; women are...
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What Gets in the Way: Latinas Who Don’t Access or Stay in Treatment
As social workers in urban settings, we often hear about the traumas our female clients endure. These include experiencing or witnessing: sexual assaults, parental abuse/neglect, domestic violence, child fatalities, and life-threatening illnesses/injuries (Gaillot 2010). Women are more likely to...
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Women and Depression: Discovering Hope
Everyone occasionally feels blue or sad, but these feelings are usually fleeting and pass within a couple of days. When a woman has a depressive disorder, it interferes with daily life and normal functioning, and causes pain for both the woman with the disorder and those who care about her....
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A Mother’s Challenge: Planning for the Transition of Decision-Making
On a recent airing of National Public Radio’s “This American Life” the narrator tells the story of Emily Feldman, a New Jersey woman in her 70’s who has been caring for her 39-year-old autistic son, Scott, all his life. Emily is getting on in years and she knows she cannot continue to care...
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The Mom of a Mentally Ill Child Needs Understanding
Being the mother of a child with mental illness is a grueling job. First, being female doesn’t help. Besides usually being the primary caretaker of the child, being female in our culture can mean being taken less seriously. There’s also an assumption, rarely directly expressed, that a mom...
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Our Patients Are Mothers Too
The impact of serious mental illness on mothers has received little attention when compared to the study of outcomes for children of parents with mental illness. Mental health providers may not routinely inquire about the parenting status of seriously mentally ill women, or consider whether they...
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Point of View – The Vulnerability of Women with Serious Mental Illness: Time for Action
Women with serious and persistent mental illnesses often have hard lives. They usually have experienced significant trauma during their childhoods. They are far more likely than those without mental illness to be homeless at one time or another, and life outdoors takes a toll on the body and the...
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Maternal Depression and Children’s Behavior in School
Care to venture a guess as to what grade level of student has the highest rate of expulsion from school because of problematic behavior? Let’s see how you did. According to a research study at Yale University, led by Dr. Walter Gilliam, the rate of expulsion in pre-kindergarten programs...
