Over the past two decades, Illinois and other largely rural states became fertile ground for a new kind of cash crop -- methamphetamine. During 1997, Illinois police seized 24 clandestine meth labs. During 2005, the number of meth lab seizures by Illinois State Police swelled to 1,200, placing Illinois second in the nation, after Missouri, for the number of clandestine production facilities closed down by police that year. A new book, "Children of Methamphetamine-Involved Families: The Case of Rural Illinois," (Oxford University Press, 2009) co-written by Wendy Haight and Teresa Ostler, professors in Illinois' School of Social Work; psychiatrist James Black and social worker Linda Kingery explores the impact of meth addiction on children in seven Illinois counties from 2003 to 2006. The researchers interviewed addicted mothers as well as 29 children who were in foster care because of their parents' meth addiction, and spent more than 90 hours shadowing professionals working with the families. Haight discussed the study – and the use of a therapeutic tool called "Life Story Intervention" – with News Bureau reporter Sharita Forrest.
Sometimes people think that small communities are far removed from problems such as addiction to illicit drugs. Has meth changed that?
We sometimes have a romantic notion of rural life, but in fact, many families in rural areas have had generations of substance abuse with alcohol and marijuana. Meth brings a different level of intensity - people may be functional alcoholics for years but become incapacitated by meth very quickly.
The project started four or five years ago when two students doing their fieldwork for their master's degrees out of the Charleston, Illinois office began noticing an influx of children into the foster-care system because of their parents' meth addiction. These children appeared to have more severe mental health and behavioral problems than other children coming into foster care. Child-welfare professionals needed to know more about these children so that they could develop strategies to help them.
We identified adults in the community who worked with children professionally - teachers, child welfare workers, retired counselors. Each adult was given support and supervision by experienced mental health professionals from neighboring urban areas to work with one child or two siblings over a six- to eight-month period. They met with the children in their own communities: at their foster homes, in libraries, and at parks. One girl wanted to hold the sessions at her mother's grave.
The children's psychological assessments in general showed they had relatively more psychiatric and behavioral problems such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder than other children in foster care. However, there was lots of individual variation. Kids who had periods of relatively normal lives before their parents' addiction spiraled out of control and children who had supportive relationships with extended family members did better.
In the book, you and your co-authors, who included a social worker practicing in the field and a psychiatrist who treats children of addicted parents, underscore the importance of understanding the context of children's experiences living with their birth families - such as having "fond memories" of eating cereal for days with a sibling because there was no other food in the house, or roaming their towns at all hours. And you also emphasized the importance of understanding the socio-cultural context of rural Illinois. Why?
If you understand the context that children come from, you can view the problems they have in foster care in a predictable way - problems obeying rules or asking permission to go places may be just socialization issues rather than defiance.
There are particular challenges in rural Illinois: The isolation that makes it easier to elude detection when operating a meth lab also may cause children to be isolated from relationships outside their families. Oftentimes it's teachers who notice something's wrong. There are few mental health services available to these rural children in foster care.
It's really important that we understand from the perspective of children and their families how meth impacts them. Prevention is so important; working with children who are at high risk for substance abuse and mental health disorders can save a great deal of human suffering, expense and criminality in the future.
We wanted an intervention that could be implemented practically on a larger scale. Life Story Intervention is a bridge to help children begin the process of talking with adults about their experiences. The adults framed the relationship as similar to that with a favorite teacher - it would last six to nine months, about the length of a school year. The adults helped the children begin to deal with the byproducts of trauma by talking about their life experiences and prepared them to say goodbye. They also helped the children identify another adult with whom they could develop an ongoing, supportive relationship thereafter.
Some of the children's stories are horrifying and fascinating: parents teaching their children to shoplift precursors for meth production or to guard parents' meth labs with guns, social worker Linda Kingery's encounter with an enraged grandfather at an isolated home. Was this a horrifying project to do?
This wasn't a horrifying project to do; it was very inspiring in some ways. We had the privilege of seeing a Department of Children and Family Services Field Office that was effective in helping children and their families, parents working hard to get well because they love their children and want a healthy family life, children who are managing to function well in spite of considerable challenges. They are worthy of our respect.
We are now working on a two-year study of intact families who have meth involvement. Some parents are new to recovery; others have been in recovery several years. All have school-age children and are involved with DCFS receiving intensive services in their homes. Many are rural and impoverished. We're taking an intensive look at each family - their interactions, the relationships between the parents, their homes - and we're getting extended developmental histories from the parents about their children as well as a battery of psychological assessments.
We're going to combine that information with the information about traumatized children to develop an intervention for rural Illinois that capitalizes on its strengths--the sense of community-- and takes into accounts its challenges, such as the lack of or distance that foster families might have to travel to obtain mental health services for foster children.
A more detailed story on Professor Haight's investigation of this issue is here.