Assignment Task: Identify primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention strategies for the health problem identified in the case study
Joonyper Light was many things - a punk rocker, a college student, a jewelry crafter, a budding businesswoman. She was also a 21-year-old heroin addict with a history of bipolar disorder and depression who was trying hard to change her life.
When she found out she was pregnant, "she got even more adamant" about beating her addiction and entered a drug treatment program, her fiancé Matt Stock said. But the emotional ups and downs of pregnancy "led to even more of a struggle." Getting clean in Springfield, Missouri, meant starting over with a whole new group of friends. "She didn't have too many support systems. She felt alone. Felt bad about me being really her only true support system and putting everything on me." As difficult as the prenatal period was, Matt said, Joonyper was "terrified of postpartum. She would always tell me, 'I don't know how I'm going to deal with this. I'm scared of how I'm going to be during that phase.'"
Their son Monte, born in September 2016, "lit up her life," Matt said. Still, with Matt working full-time installing solar panels, "there was just not a whole lot of time for her to get to her rehab," he said. Meanwhile, she worried about taking medications like antidepressants that would get in her breast milk. "She would act fine on the outside but be hurting on the inside."
The stress and depression became "just too much for her to handle," he said. Matt came home one night in November to find Joonyper on the bathroom floor, dead of an overdose. She wasn't unique; maternal mortality review committees in Texas, Colorado and Philadelphia have found that overdoses linked to mood disorders make up an increasing number of maternal deaths. "This was a relapse. This was not an ongoing thing," Matt wrote on Facebook a couple of days later. Also: "I need help. I really don't know how to deal with this."