Editor’s note: Olivia is a real person in recovery. For this article, we are not using her last name.
As a peer recovery coach at the Hamilton County Crisis Center, Lisa Hauser draws on her own personal experience while doing her job. It was not very long ago that she made a call from a jail telephone telling her family about her addiction.
“Cocaine is a very expensive habit,” Hauser said.
Now she works with women who are going through similar struggles at Hamilton County’s drug court.
According to Cincinnati substance recovery and treatment organizations, more women are coming in for treatment, thanks to same-day appointments.
“The biggest shift recently has been more women seeking help for substance use,” said Chrissy Richard, nursing director at BrightView Addiction Treatment Center. “But it’s been particularly with alcohol and a lot more prescription medications, including opiates or benzodiazepines and things of that nature.”
Six years ago, Hauser was in the same spot many of her clients were in.
She said she began feeling alone after her second marriage started falling apart. Seeking friendship, she began going to bars with a friend. Eventually, she found cocaine.
“I’ve always known not to ever do that,” Hauser said. “I hate to say ‘addiction’ because I would think to myself, ‘How could something just take over their bodies, their mind, their lives,’ and yeah, next thing I know, it begins gradual, and I’m going into it. I totaled seven cars in six years, lost jobs, began shoplifting.”
She said she stole $30,000 from her mother’s retirement fund to feed her addiction.
Eventually, this behavior landed her in jail.
“I called my family and told them I had been arrested, and that I had an addiction,” she said. Hauser said she didn’t want to tell her family out of embarrassment.
“I didn’t want to disappoint my daughter,” who is a parole officer, she said. “I didn’t want to be labeled as something other than this wonderful mother, grandmother.”
Another substance abuser, Olivia, recalls locking her car doors and sleeping in the parking lot outside the BrightView Addiction Treatment Center to make sure she got the care needed.
She is now living clean, thanks to same-day rehabilitation appointments.
Her illegal substance use began when her prescription drugs were stolen. Her boyfriend at the time dealt drugs, so to ease the pain from her surgery, she started using them.
Eventually, the drug use became habitual. Work was hard, she said, and she felt the drugs helped fight the exhaustion of her third-shift job at a factory.
“If I didn’t have the pills, I would go and do cocaine, to stay up,” she said in a YouTube video sent to CityBeat by BrightView Addiction Treatment Center.
One night, that cycle came to a moment of paranoia.
“It got to a point where I was up for four days straight, like on a bender, and I was still doing it,” she recalled. “I was just thinking in my room, ‘I’m paranoid. I’m in a corner, what am I doing? I have kids.’ I was already in an abusive relationship. I was like, ‘I need to get out of this.’”
As Olivia sat in that corner, an advertisement came on the TV for an addiction treatment center.
“I’m gonna get the number,” she remembered. “I need to get in here ASAP.”
These stories follow a trend that substance abuse by women has been on a national rise, according to the National Institutes of Health. The increase is especially notable among women in their 30s and 40s.
According to the National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics, women account for about 45% of individuals in drug treatment programs in the United States.
Richard said there has been a shift from rehabilitation clinics offering more same-day or next-day treatment opportunities, as opposed to longer stays in rehabilitation programs.
Same-day addiction treatment offers immediate access to care — often within hours — so patients can begin assessment, counseling and medication-assisted treatment for substance use disorders without waiting lists, according to the American Addiction Centers.
Olivia said she got an appointment the next morning at 8 a.m.
“I needed to get in here,” she said. “I was crying. I didn’t know what I was going to do.”
According to Dr. Kamaria A. Tyehimba, vice president at Talbert House, her organization has also seen an uptick in women seeking help for drug abuse and addiction.
As a whole, 33% of Talbert House’s regional client base is women. Within Hamilton County facilities, that number evens out a bit.
“We did see an increase in women coming into treatment from 2024 to 2025; in 2024, 25% of our clients were females coming into treatment,” Tyehimba said. “Now 40% of our clients coming into treatment are women.”
Tyehimba credited Hamilton County’s specialty courts for this increase, suggesting care and dignity go a long way in helping women get the help they need.
“When women are treated with dignity and respect and not seen as just bad people or bad mothers because there’s double standards when it comes to women in society,” she said.
Richard said the increasing number of same-day care clients at BrightView stems from the reduced barriers, letting more women get the help they need to overcome their substance use.
“The biggest barrier is when you think of women, their main focus is on their children,” Richard said. “You think about them trying to make sure that they still want to have employment and still be able to manage their family life and not only help themselves.”
That was the case for Olivia, who said she’d tried a two-month rehab stint but left because of her children.
“I had to wait so many days, and I couldn’t do that,” she said.
“I had kids at home, so I was like, I don’t want to leave my kids for another two months. I want to be able to just get something and then be able to go back home,” she continued. “And that’s what they did. So it was great.”
Women in recovery are also showing a more accelerated progression from substance abuse. Researchers call it the telescoping effect, first described in the International Journal of the Addictions in 1989: women progress from first use to full addiction faster than men across nearly every substance category.
The stages of recovery are the same, but for women, the timeline is compressed. This is largely due to biological factors. Women have lower first-pass metabolic rates, making alcohol and other substances harder to process and addiction quicker to set in.
Olivia said she’s become a different person since that first call to the recovery center.
“Before I got clean here, I was in a really bad, toxic relationship, and he beat me all the time,” she said. “I was his own punching bag, and I think that I had enough from that as well. I was actually at his house when I called BrightView.”
She arrived at BrightView, embarrassed and with bruises on her body, but said the people there allowed her to feel no shame about her past. Now, she looks forward to her future.
“I think back to that, and I’m like, damn, you had the worst of me,” she said. “Look at me now … I got the better version of myself. Now I’m clean, and I’m going to be there for my children.”
Hauser has been clean for the past six years. She credits her family for supporting her through the process of rehabilitation. Now, she is happy to be there for her clients.
Her role helping roughly 25 other women at a time stay on top of their addiction is helpful to her, she said. As a peer recovery coach, she works with women about a month out of drug court. She teaches them about responsibility, commitment, showing up and doing the work.
“(Getting away from) a life of addiction, where you’re not really having that responsibility and your only focus is to get through the day with something that’s controlling you,” Hauser said. “That’s where I will help them. The ones that are pushing through, and they’re doing it, you watch them grow, I mean, and it’s just so exciting.”