Meth Addiction & Pregnancy

Video Transcript

"Hi my name's John Bosworth. I'm a licensed mental health counselor in St. Petersburg, Florida. I'd like to talk to you a little bit about meth addiction and pregnancy. As we all know, and we can see it everyday when we're out having beers with our friends, there's usually a little sign on the side of that bottle that says may cause some kind of effect. May cause effects for pregnant women or whatever. Meth addiction is no different, actually it's a lot worse because of some of the behavior associated with it. But what you usually find in amphetamines is, especially if they're taking during pregnancy, you find that the infants and the newborns are asocial. And what that means is really they lack a sense of social awareness with their care givers OK? They also lack a sense of bonding. Many times you'll find that a baby that is born to a meth addicted mother will have some of those addictive properties and withdrawal symptoms, but also will lack an ability to bond with the mother. And we don't know really that's a purely biological or physical basis, or is there some type of interaction between the mom and baby because she still may be withdrawing or still may have addictive behaviors herself. So those, that's one thing that is really detrimental as far as pregnancy is concerned. Also, babies and infants may have tremors, they may have serious birth defects. And they also have this, meth babies have a, they can cry. They can cry for up to 24 hours at a time. And if anybody has had children or babies, you know that it's very hard to deal with anyway, let alone if the mother's coming off an addiction or the baby has withdrawals. So, what we see on the behavioral side, and a lot of professionals overlook this, is, we look at all the physiologic effects, birth effects, things like that. Birth defects. But, really what we don't pay attention to is the behavior from the parents, and how that behavior if they are still addicted, addicted to meth or engaging in that drug seeking behavior, how effective are they as parents from a social, you know from a social perspective and from actually just from a parenting perspective. How effective can they really be? So, not only physiologic effects, but very kind of functional and family effects can actually really, really harm newborns when they are born into a meth addiction or from a meth addicted mother. So, these are some of the things we can look for with meth and pregnancy. And I am John Bosworth, and recognize that there is help out there."