ADDICTED AND DYING: Hidden victims: Addiction's effect on Brown County children

May 2, 2018

By SARA CLIFFORD and SUZANNAH COUCH, Brown County Democrat

When a parent is arrested on drug charges, the adult often goes to jail.

For the child left behind, life changes, too.

Mom or dad is suddenly gone. Another adult, typically a relative, is put in charge of the child’s care. That could mean picking up and moving to a new house, a new town, a new school district.

At the very least, “you’ve got service providers, therapists, people in the court. Suddenly you’ve got 16 to 20 people, strangers, appearing in their lives, and appointment after appointment after appointment, and everything feels like it’s out of control,” said Sallyann Murphey, the director of Guardian Ad Litem, which shepherds children through court as their legal advocate.

Since becoming director of GAL in April 2009, Murphey has seen parental drug use become an ever-increasing reason for children to need her office’s services.

“When I first started, the main problem was meth, and it wasn’t good then, but it wasn’t as prevalent,” she said.

“In terms of opioids, that absolutely has arrived in the last couple of years.”

GAL’s caseload has tripled in the last two years due to opioid drugs, Murphey said. Now, somewhere in the region of 90 to 95 percent of cases GAL handles involve drugs, whereas nine years ago, that number was more like 60 to 70 percent when taking into account all substance abuse, including alcohol and marijuana, she said.

Statewide and systemwide, the story is similar.

Between 2013 and 2016, the number of Indiana children in foster care doubled. In cases where a child was removed from his or her home, parental substance abuse was a factor in 52.2 percent of cases in 2016, up from 31.7 percent in 2013, according to the Indiana Youth Institute.

Parental substance abuse can affect children in a variety of ways.

It can interfere with healthy child-parent attachment, as the parent is unable to tune into the child’s emotions. It can impair a parent’s self-control, which can increase children’s risk for physical abuse. It also can contribute to potential neglect, with lack of supervision, or with money intended for food going toward drugs, the IYI reported in an “issue brief” specifically about how youth were being affected.

Brown County’s stats from the Indiana Department of Child Services show those impacts. Of the 36 Brown County children who were placed with DCS for the first time in fiscal year 2016, 28 of them were victims of parental drug abuse — 78 percent.

That year, 27 Brown County children were listed as victims of neglect. Victims can have more than one allegation type, wrote Erin Murphy, director of communications for the state DCS office.

“You have parents who are letting toddlers wander down the street because they’re nodded off on the couch. Children who are not getting fed, washed, put to bed, helped with homework. You’re getting children who are taken out in the car at 10, 11, 12 at night, because the parents are out doing their thing, whatever that thing may be,” Sallyann Murphey said.

“Then you have families that are literally falling apart, and so these children are being removed from the home. … More and more grandparents are taking care of children in this county, and we’ve actually been talking, because there’s such enormous pressure in terms of these cases, about wanting to work on a new support group for grandparents, many of whom are rearing small children at a time when they did not expect to be.”

Grandparents as parents

As of 2015, Brown County ranked No. 10 among all 92 Indiana counties for the percentage of children living with grandparents, at 11 percent, according to the American Community Survey.

“Poverty is often an issue in our county anyway, so this is just another, enormous outside stress,” Murphey said.

Statewide among grandparents caring for grandchildren, 29 percent live below the poverty line and 26 percent have a disability, the IYI reports.

“And it isn’t just an added stress on the economically disadvantaged, because opioid addiction hits at every economic level. … It is an equal opportunity addictor,” Murphey added.

The main issue the Brown County Health Department sees regarding the opioid epidemic is grandparents trying to meet their grandchildren’s needs, said Brown County Health Department Public Health Nurse Supervisor Jennifer Unsworth. She participates in the Brown County Drug Free Coalition, which meets monthly.

“What we try to do there is keep them up-to-date on immunizations the children might need and when to schedule them at a proper interval. Then, we refer them to places, if they need WIC (Women, Infants, Children aid program) or Head Start (early intervention preschool) or Mother’s Cupboard,” she said.

“We mainly see them because most of them are on Medicaid and the doctors around here will not vaccinate Medicaid patients, so they refer to them to us.”

Those grandparents are concerned about their own children, too, who are struggling in a different way, Unsworth said. “But their main focus is making sure that the grandchildren have food and shelter and get to school and are properly immunized.”

In many ways, the world in which children live now isn’t like the one in which their parents were raised. Custodial grandparents are seeing that, especially those raising teenagers, said Brown County High School Principal Shane Killinger.

“Not only are they tired, but there’s also the lack of information about social media and what their kids are doing,” he said.

“’Well, they told me they were in there talking to their friends playing their Xbox.’ They take it for granted because they believe them. They believe them because that’s their grandchild and their grandchild doesn’t lie to them,” Killinger said.

“They say, ‘Help us. We don’t understand.’ We’ll have them come in and show them how to use Skyward (an online grade-tracking program) and check on these things,” Killinger said.

“I can’t keep up.”

‘Ripple effect’

Killinger said some people may not understand the collateral effect that drug use in the home has on children. Sometimes, it’s seen in the classroom.

“It’s one thing to talk about the student who is on drugs and dealing with that situation, but I don’t think people understand the ripple effect when the adults are on the drugs and how that affects the kids,” he said.

“The kid goes home and both parents are now thrown in jail for drugs. Talk about totally world upside down. That’s the part that’s so hard; there’s so many different variables.”

Through the help of a school counseling grant, the district is working to implement a new curriculum at each grade level to help combat the drug epidemic. It will start next year, and it’ll start in kindergarten.

“It’s not, ‘Just say no to drugs,’ it’s ‘drug education,’” Superintendent Laura Hammack said.

Melissa Tatman, a grandparent who’s 17 years sober herself, said the community can’t wait too long to start educating children. “I’m not talking about a Nancy Reagan, ‘Just-say-no’ kind of campaign. God bless her soul, I am sure she meant well, but it’s more than that. They need coping skills. They’re going to have a lot to cope with,” she said.

Tatman runs a recovery ministry in the Brown County jail and at New Life Community Church, and is raising three of her grandchildren because their mother is in recovery.

She said if she could start another ministry, it would be in the elementary schools, “educating the teachers to see these kinds of behavior in kids where they isolate or they act out from pain. Why are they acting out? Are they truly ADD or ADHD? Or is their home life a wreck? They’re being raised by grandparents; they don’t know where their parents are and they haven’t seen their dad in months. That’s devastating. It makes you different,” she said.

Carrie Foley, director of Silver Linings Women’s Shelter, worries about children who are still in the wombs of women battling addiction.

“Pregnancy rates are going up, and they are damaged. You’re seeing (in) visits for a lot of our women, the kids seem to be delayed in one way or another. Some are very sweet, but I am really afraid for the next generation that is coming up,” she said.

“We’re going to be facing a crisis in 10 years. It’s like, how we’re going to work with folks who have drug effects?”

One state-sponsored study suggested that 20 percent of babies born in Indiana test positive for opioids, wrote Richard Feldman, a family physician and former Indiana health commissioner, in the Indianapolis Star last fall.

That worries Tatman, whose grandson was born addicted.

“The hospitals are full of babies that are born addicted right now. Does that make them already addicted? … What are they going to give them for pain? What is it going to do to them?” she said. “I can’t imagine what that’s going to look like.”

Mending the hurt

In Brown Circuit Court, Guardian Ad Litem volunteers are in short supply as the number of cases involving children rises.

At any time, GAL volunteers could be working on 35 to 40 cases, and each case represents a family, Murphey said.

A GAL is appointed in every CHINS case. CHINS stands for “child in need of services.”

Between 2015 and 2017, the number of Brown County CHINS cases rose from 21 to 70.

“Unfortunately, for the first time in program history, we have a waiting list,” Murphey said.

“We never used to, but we just don’t have enough guardians ad litem to serve in every case.”

Murphey meets with DCS about once a month to go through the cases and prioritize them according to who needs the most advocacy, she said. They make sure we have a guardian ad litem on the most critical cases.

Foster parents also are in “incredibly short” supply, she said. Typically, children will be placed with a relative; she knows of Brown County children who have been moved as far away as Vigo and Fountain counties.

In CHINS cases, a team of people work to provide resources, like family therapy, with the goal of reuinifying the family as quickly and safely as possible, Murphey said.

“The judicial process is what ultimately determines parental custody,” DCS’ Erin Murphy added. “However, the Department of Child Services offers support and services to assist families in their journey. If the home is deemed a safe and supportive environment for the child, then DCS will recommend to the courts that custody be reestablished with the parents. This is the ultimate goal, for all children to have a home that is safe and nurturing and within the family unit.”

In some cases, children might never return to their actual home, especially if it was used as a meth lab. “If it’s really bad, everything has to be destroyed,” she said. “Does it ever occur to you that ‘everything’ might also include a child’s toys and family photographs and every record that they have from their childhood? At the end of the day, it’s the child that’s left with nothing.”

The most significant gift Murphey ever gave to one of her GAL children was a framed photo of her with her mother. It was the only thing she was able to save.

“She idolized her,” Murphey said.

“These kids, no matter what these parents do, these kids just have this ability to just adore their parents.”

[sc:pullout-title pullout-title=”By the numbers” ][sc:pullout-text-begin]

Brown County children placed with out-of-home care with the Department of Child Services for the first time, whose parent’s drug issue was at least one reason for their removal:

5 in federal fiscal year 2013

6 in FFY 2014

3 in FFY 2015

28 (78 percent of new cases) in FFY 2016

12 (27 percent of new cases) in FFY 2017

Source: Indiana Department of Child Services

CHINS (child in need of services) cases in Brown Circuit Court:

18 in 2012

17 in 2013

17 in 2014

21 in 2015

64 in 2016