Empowering Mothers to Overcome Addiction

“I want to make sure that we’re asking the right questions and not making assumptions that are not appropriate to make. Researchers and health care providers are not immune from stigma and bias.”

Nichole Nidey

UI maternal-child health epidemiologist who invites people with lived experience to inform her studies of substance use

Changing the narrative

Dedicated to moving that needle is a maternal-child health epidemiologist in the UI College of Public Health. Nichole Nidey, who joined the UI faculty in 2023, has made it her life’s work to advocate for pregnant women and mothers with substance use disorders — by involving in her research those, like Eleazer, with lived experience.

During her graduate studies at Iowa, Nidey was struck by how people with substance use disorders were presented in the research studies she was reading, and she switched her focus from maternal mental health to substance use.

“I’ve known and loved people who use drugs, and I did not see them represented on those pages. I saw a deficit in the narrative and a lot of assumptions that did not check out with what I knew personally,” says Nidey, who earned from Iowa a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and master’s and doctoral degrees in epidemiology. “While working on my dissertation, I tried to see if there was any evidence of people with lived experience of drug use being meaningfully involved in the research process, and I couldn’t find anything. So, when I started my postdoctoral fellowship at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, I wrote my first grant, and that was EMPOWER.”

The EMPOWER Project, Nidey says, aims to involve people with lived experience in the development of training curriculums for providers who see perinatal patients with substance use. She recruited 20 women across seven states to join and inform her work, which she continues today at Iowa.

“I want to make sure that we’re asking the right questions and not making assumptions that are not appropriate to make,” she says. “Researchers and health care providers are not immune from stigma and bias.”

In addition to engaging with those mothers, Nidey has been gathering perspectives from health care professionals, researchers, policymakers, and community members. In September 2024, she invited several dozen people to the UI College of Public Health to brainstorm and develop strategies for improving care for Iowans with substance use disorder, with special attention to methamphetamine use. It was a casual, World Café–style event in which participants met in small groups to discuss related topics.

“That event created connections that people hadn’t had before — many in that room have significant impacts on people who use drugs during pregnancy but have never been with each other in the same room,” she says. “I’m hoping those connections will help move forward some issues that we had discussed.”

Next up, Nidey says, is employing some of the tactics discussed. “If we have a better understanding of addiction and the reasons why people use drugs and why it’s really hard to stop using drugs, I think that can inform better policies in the state.”

It’s an issue all Americans should care about, Nidey adds.

“Overdose from opioids and stimulants is among the leading causes of maternal mortality in the United States — that’s not just losing a mom, it’s losing a sibling or a daughter,” she says. “Many of the bad outcomes we see with these families are not necessarily due to the drug but rather to bad policy and the stigma associated with drug use.”