Substance Use or Addictive Disorders, Article Review Example

Introduction

Fiona Martin and Shaughney Aston sought to determine if the lack of gender sensitivity in drug treatment services is linked to the higher relapse rate of women. The authors analyzed and researched published journals between the years of 1990 and 2012 that dealt with the unique needs of women substance abusers.

Methodology

The authors wanted to identify and support the belief that treating women substance abusers should look differently than treating male substance abusers. First, they analyzed research by some of the leading feminist scholars that have demonstrated that women who are substance abusers are usually dealing with issues of feeling that they have failed to adhere to gender norms. Consequently, feminist believe that women’s substance abuse issues can be directly linked to social and societal issues. The authors use the Journal Citation Reports database to identify five substance abuse journals with the highest impact factors. The used: These were the journals Addiction, Addiction Biology, Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, Drug and Alcohol Dependence, and Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment. They were able to locate 95 articles that met their criteria. Their criteria was: “ the etiological factors underlying women’s substance use/substance abuse/substance dependence; the particular consequences or harms associated with women’s substance use/ substance abuse/substance dependence; and measures (e.g., preventative or treatment focused) to address women’s substance use/substance abuse/substance dependence”.  This criterion left 24 articles to be analyzed. With these 24 articles, the authors posed 2 questions: What are the dominant ways in which women’s substance abuse is represented? What assumptions underlie these representations of women’s substance abuse?  After posing these two questions to each article, themes emerged.

Findings

“Our analysis of this literature made one thing patently clear: From a clinical and epidemiological perspective women’s substance abuse is a distinct phenomenon with its own unique causes and consequences”.  According to the authors, over and over again, women were referred to as a unique population and differentiated from men for a plethora of reasons. First, they determined that the physiological, psychological and socio-cultural factors they led to women abusing drugs or alcohol was significantly different from that of men.  Women who abused drugs or alcohol were at a greater risk of morbidity and mortality than men. Abusing heightened vulnerability of women, caused more adverse side effects, and women were more likely to suffer social consequences than men. Women abusers are more likely to suffer from psychiatric problems brought on by drug use than men.  One significant difference that was noted dealing with mothering responsibilities.  For example,

“Other articles addressed women’s mothering responsibilities. Some discussed the “barriers” that women’s childcare responsibilities present, in terms of their willingness or ability to access drug treatment services. In the main, however, attention was directed at the effects of women’s substance abuse on their children. Some articles suggested, for example, that more support should be made available to substance-abusing mothers on the grounds that they often struggle to care adequately for their children”

So, in other words, women have more of a long term affect on society with their drug use. Women substance abusers can cause adverse social consequences.

References

Martin, F.S., & Aston, S. (2014). A special population with unique treatment needs: Dominant representations of women’s substance abuse and their effects. Contemporary Drug Problems, 41(3), 335-360.