Helping Clients Engage With Remote Mutual Aid for Addiction Recovery During COVID-19 and Beyond

Impact of COVID-19 on alcohol use disorder recovery: A qualitative study

In March 2020, restrictions on in-person gatherings were introduced due to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, requiring alcohol use disorder (AUD) recovery resources to migrate to virtual platforms. This study investigated how these restrictions impacted recovery attempts and explored participant experiences with virtual resources using a qualitative approach. Participants attempting recovery from AUD (N = 62; Mage = 48.2; F = 53.2%; 71% White) completed virtual semistructured interviews from July 2020 to August 2020 on their experience during the COVID-19 lockdown, impacts on recovery, and experiences with online resources. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using a thematic coding process. Three overarching themes were identified: Effect on Recovery, Virtual Recovery Resources, and Effect on General Life. Within each overarching theme, lower order parent themes and subthemes reflected varied participant experiences. Specifically, one group of participants cited negative impacts due to COVID-19, a second group reported positive impacts, and a third group reported experiencing both positive and negative impacts. Participants reported both positive and negative experiences with virtual resources, identifying suggestions for improvement and other resources. Findings suggest that while individuals in AUD recovery experienced significant hardships, a proportion experienced positive impacts as well, and the positive and negative consequences were not mutually exclusive. Additionally, the results highlight the limitations of existing virtual resources. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

'Anarchist technologies': Anarchism, cybernetics and mutual aid in community responses to the COVID-19 crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic that gripped the world since the end of 2019 has been felt most immediately both as a health crisis and an economic, social and political crisis. Secondary impacts of social distancing and lockdown in many countries have put strains on people's capacities to provide essential food and medicines for themselves and their families. In response, outside of centralised government and voluntary sector frameworks, local mutual aid groups have emerged around the world as a primary site of community resilience. Given mutual aid's strong links to the anarchist political tradition, for example in its identification by Kropotkin as a factor in evolution, this article suggests that these new mutual aid groups can be understood best through the related concept of self-organisation. Tying anarchist approaches to mutual aid and self-organisation together, it is argued that cybernetics and Stafford Beer's Viable System Model (VSM) offer useful tools in helping both academic analysis and on-the-ground practice assess and improve the effectiveness of mutual aid in and beyond the COVID-19 crisis. The article offers a qualitative thematic analysis of anarchist and related texts published during the pandemic that reflect on mutual aid practice. In doing so, it highlights some of the challenges and tensions such self-organised mutual aid practice might face and proposes a participatory research agenda drawing on Beer's VSM.