Helping Clients Engage with Remote Mutual Aid for Addiction Recovery during COVID-19 and Beyond

ABSTRACT

Face-to-face mutual-aid meetings such as Alcoholics Anonymous shuttered with the onset of COVID-19. Research could not be conducted quickly enough to provide guidance for how to respond. However, two powerful tools could be leveraged: the research on mutual aid conducted before the pandemic and the vast number of virtual resources that proliferated with the onset of the pandemic. This article reviews the existing mutual aid research and its relevance to COVID-19, describes the diverse array of virtual resources, and provides recommendations for successful engagement with virtual mutual aid during COVID-19 and beyond.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• addiction
• substance use disorders
• recovery
• mutual aid
• 12-step
• Alcoholics Anonymous
• Narcotics Anonymous
• SMART Recovery
• Women for Sobriety
• LifeRing

Acknowledgments

With thanks to my colleagues who provided comments on drafts on this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under Grant UL1TR002494. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.