December 2021

Charlie Oen’s battle with addiction started when he was 16 and his family moved to Lima, Ohio. It was the last stop in a string of moves his military family made — from Panama to North Carolina, Kentucky, Texas and Germany. “I went toward a bad group because those were the people that accepted me,” he says. Drugs became a substitute for real friendships. He started drinking, popping pills, cooking meth and shooting heroin. He was homeless for a while when his parents kicked him out of the...

During the Civil War , military hospitals considered opioids to be essential medicine. Doctors and nurses used opium and morphine to treat soldiers’ pain, stop internal bleeding and mitigate vomiting and diarrhea caused by infectious diseases. However, this led some soldiers to develop opioid addictions, either during the war or afterward when they sought medical treatment for wartime injuries or illnesses. Opioid use has a long history in the United States. Before the Civil War, doctors...

National Grief Awareness Week "Crying isn't the hurt, it is the process of being unhurt". Althea Solter ------------ The chronic grief of children and youth who are impacted by a parent's substance use can often go unacknowledged or be invalidated. As such, it is important for professionals to understand the chronic loss that can occur in a child's life when a parent struggles with addiction, particularly if both parents struggle. This grief can be compounded by a stigma that prevents...