Learning her son was a heroin addict left Melissa Forsyth in a state of depression.
“I just never thought it would happen to me,” she said. On top of her self-blame, her Staten Island community wasn’t particularly understanding either. Drug addiction just didn’t happen in a good family like hers.
When her son joined a treatment program, Forsyth joined therapy for family members of addicts and gained an understanding of her son’s affliction that offered solace and hope.
“You learn to understand that it’s literally a brain disease, that new pathways are opened up in the brain by the drugs and it starts affecting the cognitive thought process,” she said. “I learned not to blame myself. ... It helped me to learn how to be happy again.”
New Take on an Epidemic
Last year, over 52,000 people died of drug overdoses. More than 33,000 deaths involved opioids, a four-time increase since 1999, thanks in part to the over-marketing and over-prescribing of opioid painkillers like oxycodone.
With over 2 million people in the United States addicted to painkillers last year and almost 600,000 more to heroin, new approaches to drug addiction are needed. And so, research decades in the making is finally receiving mainstream attention.
The knowledge that helped Forsyth turn her life around has been known to experts for at least 15 years, said Emily Feinstein, director of health law and policy at the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, a nonprofit.
