Long-Term Effects of Methadone Addiction in Children

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is John Bosworth. I'm a License Mental Health Counselor in St. Petersburg, Florida. I like to speak about the long term effects of methadone addiction in children. First of all, addiction to any substance at any age or at, for any age for a person can create problems and I'd like to look at in three different areas. And the first problem I want to look at is medical or biological. Biologically speaking, when an addiction becomes dependency, the body of course is dependent, that's what the word comes from is dependent on the actual substance that the person is using. In children what happens is, if the person is born to an addicted mother, the children usually, the child usually has a certain sensitivity to the drug or can actually be born addicted to the drug itself. So what we see are, from a medical and biological perspective are basic developmental and cognitive deficits, definite respiratory complications 'cause the, the drug methadone acts on the central nervous system and respiration; cardiac irregularities and liver and metabolic trouble. The other area that I like to look at that affects, that affects children long term as far as addiction is psychological development. And really, there's a lot of developmental delays and there can be cognitive, attention deficits, memory deficits, but the psychological effect that usually is most damaging is that the person that the caregiver or the mother or the father, if they are addicted also, is going to be less likely a nurturing parent or actually a really good caregiver. So, what you start to see is, in addition to the biological or the medical problems, that these, these kids are not really being parented correctly so they lack a lot of social skills and a lot of love and support and compassion from their parents and with that goes to, to the third area of long term effects which is psycho-social. And psycho-social what we mean is most kids with addiction problems or that are born into families with addiction problems tend to come from lower socio-economic status and not all the time; some can come from upper socio-economic status. But most of the time, we see them in lower socio-economic status so they're challenged already but then there's lack of social support; they have lacked of peer support because a lot of their friends aren't from the same type of families with addictions or whatever and also we see that there's, there's a lack of self-acceptance or self-esteem in kids with, with addiction because they know, you know, by the behavior in their family compared to other families that there's some major differences. My name is John Bosworth and I'm talking a little bit about the long term effects of methadone addiction in children."