3. Sabrina Tavernise, “Deaths in Painkiller Overdoses Rise Sharply Among Women,” the New York Times, July 3, 2013.
4. National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (CASA), June 2012, “Addiction Medicine: Closing the Gap Between Science and Practice,” http://www.casacolumbia.org/addiction-research/reports/addiction-medicine.
5. Bill Moyers, “Addiction Can Be a Disease and a Behavior,” the New York Times, April 10, 1998. William Cope Moyers is the author, with Katherine Ketcham, of Broken: My Story of Addiction and Redemption (New York: Viking, 2006).
Does Your Daughter Have an Addiction Problem?
“I think parents put on blinders,” confides Amy. A young woman in her early twenties, she has been off drugs for a year and a half. She describes growing up in a loving home in a stable community. Then in high school, feelings of awkwardness about herself led her to try pot, and next the readily available prescription painkillers that were hawked around the school. By the time she graduated she was snorting heroin. Since Amy managed to keep up her work and got into college, her family thought she must be okay, if a bit depressed. It wasn’t until she was arrested for possession of illegal drugs in college and faced significant jail time that they realized they had ignored a lot of troubling signs along the way.
Taking the First Steps toward Change
Will a parent see trouble ahead when they are reassured by signs of achievement, even if their daughter is withdrawn or moody or rebellious in other ways? How can we distinguish between a little experimenting, risky behavior, and abuse of alcohol or other drugs? Isn’t it a rite of passage for kids to “experiment” a little? Isn’t it usually just a phase? Many young people stick to “recreational” use at parties with their friends, and that’s as far as it goes. Some parents who may themselves have indulged in their youth don’t want to be hypocritical. They might even feel a bit nostalgic.
What you need to know: The possibility of a child’s using drugs or alcohol usually begins around puberty. For girls, this age arrives increasingly earlier, and by age thirteen, “more than twice as many girls as boys are depressed, a proportion that persists into adulthood, regardless of race or ethnicity.”1 And depression increases the risk of addiction. It could be you become concerned about signs of depression in your daughter and seek help for her from a counselor or therapist. But a depressed young woman who is using substances is more likely to hide her substance use and to be treated for depression than for her drug use, whereas a depressed young man who uses substances is more likely to get treatment for his addiction. In fact, women of all ages are less likely to be diagnosed with addiction than are men.2 Therefore, if your daughter is depressed, have her checked out by a competent physician for possible drug use. Many parents of young women using drugs I’ve talked to sent their kids to therapists. The girls were sometimes prescribed antidepressants—but their use of substances went undiagnosed.
There are, of course, many factors besides depression that drive girls to use substances. It seems parents have a different view of what motivates their children than the kids do. In one study, when asked to choose from a list of reasons why kids use drugs, most parents picked “peer pressure” or “it feels good.” But their kids mostly chose “stress.”3
Stress for girls and young women can coalesce around their body image. Lifestyle marketing bombards them with sexually charged ads that depict women as thin, thin, thin. Not long ago, the tobacco companies had tremendous power over young people’s decision to smoke. Remember Virginia Slims? That power may have been curtailed, but it’s going strong in the liquor industry. Ads infused with glamour show smiling (thin) young women sipping concoctions like the Skinnygirl Cocktail line. Or have you heard of alcopops, those cocktails on training wheels?
Illegal drugs, in turn, have won a subversive glamour of their own in America in waves of different epidemics over the centuries. I was surprised to learn the first big drug addiction epidemic occurred in the late 1800s, led by legally prescribed opiates such as laudanum, as well as patent or over-the-counter medicines that contained such additives as Coca-Cola syrup, which at that time included cocaine for a pick-you-up, marketed mostly to women to increase energy.
As Thomas Deitzler, Director of the Young Adult Program at the Caron Center for Recovery, put it to me in a conversation in 2010, “Addiction is in epidemic proportions with this generation.” Again, the vast majority of risky users and addicts start when they are teenagers; women get addicted to alcohol and other drugs more quickly than men.4 Yet they often hide their use more than young men do. “Boys learn from their earliest days on the playground, jumping at dares, that the willingness to take risks is part of what it means to be a man. For adolescent boys, alcohol and other drug use is the next step in the natural progression of risk taking . . . . Boys who drink may feel invincible, immortal, and beyond the reach of the law.”5 More often than girls, boys using substances may also seek negative attention, like being suspended or kicked out of school, getting arrested, driving too fast and having a car accident, until it becomes clear to those around him, sometimes including the criminal justice system, that he has a problem with substances.6 Girls tend to be sneakier and more adept at hiding their use, at least at first. The sooner parents identify and respond to a problem-in-the-making with them, the greater the possibility these young women will have a chance to regain healthy lives.
Checklist of Warning Signs of a Possible Substance Use Problem
An eighteen-year-old high school senior, who was taking a variety of painkillers—whatever she could get from friends who mostly cadged them from family medicine cabinets or bought illegally obtained painkillers—describes herself then: “I grew thin and listless, stopped showering, and began sleeping at all hours.” She adds that her parents didn’t suspect drug use until she ended up in the emergency room after an overdose.
The following checklist can help you decide if your daughter may be either at risk for addiction or already addicted. No one can predict which kids will go down the road of addiction. Early intervention saves lives. For young people whose brains are still developing in the teen years and until about the age of twenty-five, some of these warning signs may seem to be the “normal” moodiness of a young person navigating the rocky passage to adulthood. However, if you recognize more than a few of them in your daughter there is cause for concern.
Physical signs
• Smoking (Does this surprise you? It did me. But, research consistently links smoking to depression—and depressed young people are more likely to turn to alcohol or other drugs.)
• Red, watery eyes, heavy use of eye drops
• Shaking hands, feet, or head, lack of coordination, clumsiness, stumbling, lack of balance
• Puffy face
• Paleness
• Vomiting
• Nausea
• Hacking cough
• Runny nose (not from a cold or allergies)
• Frequent nosebleeds
• Dilated pupils
• Alcohol on the breath, smoke on the breath, bad breath
• Rapid heartbeat
• Sores that don’t heal
• Spots around the mouth
• Needle or track marks
• Excessive talking (motor mouth), hyperactivity, clenched teeth, slurred speech