Occupational Therapy Case Study

Jane is a 26-year-old divorced woman who has been living with a boyfriend, Max, for the past six months. Both are heroin addicts with long histories of substance abuse. Jane reports that she dropped out of high school and left home at age 16 years because her father was sexually abusing her. For a long time, she lived on the streets making money as a prostitute. She reports having been extremely depressed and using alcohol and marijuana to dull her unhappiness. At 18 years old, she met the first of a succession of boyfriends who were heroin addicts and she was introduced to heroin through him. She often drinks heavily, smoke cigarettes and, when the supply of heroin is low, she takes diazepam or Oxycodone to tide her over. She continues to work the streets at night as a prostitute and she spends most of her days in a drug-induced fog. Jane recently acquired heroin that was not cut as heavily as usual; she overdosed and ended up in an emergency department. Although she indicated she does not want to stop using, she also knows that she has become increasingly depressed and has thought about taking her life. The social worker in the emergency department finally convinced her to try inpatient mental health treatment because of concerns about her suicidal thoughts. Jane stayed in the hospital for 3 days and then agreed to try methadone. She has since been attending weekly out-patient chemical dependency meetings at the methadone clinic. Assignment directions: Using the content from readings, Bonder (2015) and lectures from this week’s module, please answer the following critical thinking questions. Remember, for a top grade, to include proper APA in-text citations and references to support your answers and thinking for each question. In which of the eight areas of occupation would you expect Jane to have difficulty? (i.e., Specific ADLs, specific IADLs, work, etc…use the OT Practice Framework.)  Of these functional deficits, which are the result of her early life experiences and which the result of her substance use? Can you make this distinction? Why or why not? Conduct a search using either OT Practice, AJOT, SIS Quarterly, or any scholarly OT journal from another country regarding occupational therapy and substance use/chemical dependency and give a synopsis of what you read from one article. The article needs to be published within the last 10 years.