photo by Jose Antonio Gallego Vázquez on Unsplash
The view from COVID quarantine
Brandon starts his days with 20 minutes of meditation and a cup of coffee. After work, the 23-year-old carpenter heads home for a shower, another round of meditation, and maybe some ice cream.
On a good day, he’ll work out. On a bad day—when he’s tempted to break his six months of sobriety—he’ll drive from his home in Chapel Hill to Freddy’s, where he’ll snag a large vanilla concrete with Oreos, Butterfinger, Heath Bar, and cheesecake.
Brandon (whose name has been changed to protect his privacy) credits his meditation regimen for allowing him to stay centered amid the pandemic and endlessly depressing news cycle. This is progress; for the first months of lockdown, he couldn’t read the news without becoming angry and overwhelmed. When he experiences these feelings, he wants to get away from them—and that’s risky territory.
“It’s too scary, and it’s too real, and I have no way of escaping that right now,” Brandon says. “And the way that my mind was, is sometimes I’m not at capacity to handle that information and stay sober.”
Local addiction experts suggest that Brandon is one of many people struggling to cling to sobriety during this unprecedented global health crisis. Compounding widespread existential dread are closer-to-home disasters—unemployment, police brutality, financial insecurity, domestic violence—which have left folks carrying tremendous burdens in relative isolation.
“When you think about the close quarters people are being forced to adhere to and the ways that they need or choose to cope with it, it’s no surprise that we’re breeding basically the next generation of addicts,” says Michael Lewis, a financial planner in Cary who specializes in addiction cost planning and has a son in long-term recovery.
The Alcohol and Drug Council of North Carolina has reported a significant increase in calls related to mental health challenges, executive director Kurtis Taylor told the INDY. Isolation and stress of those stuck at home have heightened fear, anxiety, and domestic violence—and many people look to substances to deal with these tribulations.
“I think that the shelter-in-place aspect of COVID-19 has had devastating, long-term effects—effects that we possibly haven’t seen the results of yet,” Taylor says. “When things get back to some sense of—for lack of a better term—normalcy, I think that we’ll find that people will emerge with issues that are not easily shaken.”
This unprecedented stress can induce grief, anger, terror, and the feeling of being trapped: deep-seated emotions from which people naturally want to escape. Raleigh psychotherapist Paige Armstrong says substance abuse is a way to “numb the underlying pain.”
Emotional strife also includes hunger, exhaustion, boredom, and loneliness, she says. And for those in recovery from addictions, these feelings raise the risk of relapse.
Suzanne Brown, an addiction specialist in Chapel Hill, says she’s noticed COVID-related fears triggering past trauma in her clients.
“People began re-experiencing their trauma, having memories pop back up that they hadn’t had in a long time—even people who had successfully dealt with a lot of their trauma,” Brown says.
Although these fears might be topically unrelated to the trauma, she says, our bodies can’t tell the difference, so they perform the same “survivor mode” fear response that they did during the traumatic event. To numb the memories and the accompanying feelings, some people self-medicate.
Because the pandemic has uprooted constants and disrupted routines, it’s hit those in recovery particularly hard as many use routines to nurture their recovery programs, Taylor says.
For Brandon, that’s meant not being able to attend his recovery meetings, which he says keep him “in the right frame of mind for sobriety.” Meetings over Zoom have still proven helpful for him, but it’s not the same experience, and he’s found it harder to stay plugged into the recovery community.
The same goes for Ryan Morris, a Durham resident whose meetings with SMART Recovery have shifted online. The online resources still help, he says, but he misses the camaraderie and fellowship that come with being in the same room. COVID-19 has also taken away the gym, which he used as an outlet for his anxiety in lieu of alcohol.
“The gym didn’t completely eliminate that urge to drink, but it definitely helped,” Morris says. “So not having the gym available to me has been a little bit difficult.”
The pandemic has posed a greater risk of developing addiction even to those without mental health conditions or substance use disorders. Brown says addiction is a progressive disease that often starts out with experimental, recreational, and social substance use.
“And then once you get into regular and habitual use and it becomes more consistent, there’s an increased risk of developing an addiction,” she told the INDY.
Isolation and boredom can make it easy to slip into regular and habitual use. Taylor pointed out how quarantine allows for much less scrutiny and accountability, and, for many, much more free time. Casual drinkers might find themselves imbibing more than usual, as they’re already at home and don’t have to drive anywhere afterward.
While it’s been widely reported that alcohol sales have skyrocketed during the pandemic, it’s more difficult to quantify whether COVID-19 has boosted addiction rates. For instance, Hendrée Jones, professor at UNC School of Medicine and executive director of UNC Horizons, has previously looked at NCDHHS’ Opioid Data Dashboard for data that could indicate a surge in opioid addiction within the state.
“But I have not been able to find any data in North Carolina documenting what I know so many of us are clinically observing, which is increases in relapses, increases in overdose and fatal overdoses,” Jones says. “Anecdotally, that’s what we’re seeing.”
Safety measures designed to protect people’s physical health have created barriers to maintaining their psychological health, particularly with addiction, Jones told the INDY.
The key to combating addiction during COVID is connection, Brown says, because substance use increases when people feel isolated. People need to find ways to authentically connect, whether that means doing things together or asking deeper questions about well-being.
“I got a text the other day from my cousin,” Brandon says. “He said, congratulations on six months [of sobriety], and that’s nice, you know? It’s good to hear that people are thinking about me.”
The story has been updated to note Lewis's firm operates out of Cary.
Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.
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