For many people lockdown has been an unpleasant experience, spurring negative emotions from boredom to loneliness to despair. Even if we enjoy solitude, few of us like to be forcibly isolated from the social groups that bring us support and companionship – especially during uncertain times.
But what if your mental health absolutely depended on being able to sit with like-minded people and discuss your feelings? What if the absence of such facetime could cause you to spiral back into destructively negative behaviors that you already knew from experience could threaten your life?
Such has been the situation facing those with addictions. Many have sought help through rehabilitation and achieved a much more contented new way of life free of their previous compulsions. A great number of these have successfully maintained such equilibrium, often for years and decades, through 12-step programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) – but these are ongoing methods, requiring regular self-monitoring through attendance at “meetings” in which recovering addicts honestly share their experiences to help each other through whatever life may throw at them.
Suddenly, as society closed down – and with it, the churches, school halls, scout huts, back rooms and rented areas where 12-steppers gathered in self-support – those meetings abruptly ended, just as the people who needed them most were being asked to adapt to an uncertain future in which a lethal new plague was straddling the globe. Would this create a perfect storm of relapse and spiralling addictions?
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