Nursing responds to the Opiate Crisis

The data are staggering. According to Connecticut’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, 415 people died of heroin overdoses in 2015. Connecticut’s Senator Richard Blumenthal has called the opiate and heroin crisis a “public health hurricane.”

Mental health nurse Dr. Annette Maruca, assistant clinical professor and an associate in the School of Nursing’s Center for Correctional Health Networks, knows this reality from her practice. “Substance use disorders and mental illnesses are linked and share both risk factors and protective factors,” she explained. “Up to half of persons with a serious mental illness will develop a substance use disorder at some point in their lives.”

In her work with incarcerated citizens, Maruca observes that “mental illness is disproportionately represented in corrections where an increasing number of persons with mental illness, including those who have co-occurring substance abuse disorders, have come into contact with the criminal justice system over the past decade.” Well over half of inmates in state prisons and local jails have mental health problems.

“Biochemical and  neuroanatomical brain alterations occur with chronic substance use and influence a person’s vulnerability to addiction,” Maruca explained. “Unlike the common belief that a person can ‘just stop using,’ research has shown that chronic use causes changes in the brain reinforcing the need for the substance.”

There is hope, however. “A community evidence-based intervention is Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT),” Maruca said. “Combining SBIRT with on-site medication-assisted treatments could become a routine practice in hospital settings to help address the opioid epidemic and prevent overdose deaths.”