13 minute read
Isolation and addiction
HIDDEN PAIN
Changes to everyday life brought on by the pandemic have increased despair and distress for Long Islanders recovering from substance abuse disorders and opioid addiction.
Advertisement
BY ROBERT TRAVERSO
The pandemic changed everything he did on a day-to-day basis. “No gyms, no places of worship… You can’t go see friends or family… You can’t work on oneself or get a haircut or a shave… We were trying to help him find new things to do and healthy ways to cope, but everything we thought of was closed,” said Kathleen Alvino, a substance abuse counselor at Confide Counseling Center, a non-profit organization based in Rockville Centre, describing how Covid-19 has upended the life of one of her clients in recovery. “The only thing he could find to do was go to the grocery store… Well, the grocery stores sell alcohol, too, and that led him to relapse,” Alvino said. “He was forced to be alone at a time when he needed to be with others the most. There was basically nothing to do but be alone.” The isolation and social-distancing measures put in place to stem the spread of the coronavirus have had a profound effect on Long Islanders who struggle with substance use disorders (SUDs), experts say. The isolation has led to a resurgence in overdoses and substance abuse to cope with mental health issues and economic angst amid the pandemic. A July 2020 nationwide study found that 75,000 “deaths of despair” — caused by drug misuse, alcohol and suicide — can be attributed to the high levels of stress, isolation and unemployment brought by the coronavirus pandemic. “The pandemic made it easier for individuals to get alcohol and drugs and made it harder to access treatment,” Alvino said.
Overdoses on Long Island rose from 2020 to 2021, and alcohol sales have risen across the country since the pandemic began.
Illustration by Nanaimo/Canda - Wikimedia Commons
By 2019, the worst of Long Island’s opioid epidemic, dating back more than a decade, appeared to be waning. Opioid-related deaths had started to fall in 2017, a trend that was expected to continue. Adrienne LoPresti, executive director at YES Community Counseling Center, a Nassau-based non-profit that works to prevent and treat substance abuse, said YES has experienced an uptick in requests for services. She also noted that the Nassau County Police Department alerted YES to a 55 percent increase in non-fatal overdoses in January compared to the same month a year before.
The impact of isolation
Local experts pointed to isolation as the number one factor that has led to the rise in overdoses.
“People have been stuck home and some all alone… The isolation leads people to think about using, and for many, they have relapsed over the last year. Holidays spent alone because of restrictions on gathering… all of these things lead to depression,” Alvino said.
Tricia Ragusa, a certified peer recovery advocate at YES and a teacher, has been sober for five years, following a decade-long struggle with opioid addiction. She said a SUD often tempts individuals to isolate from society, which becomes their chance to abuse substances – this, she said, makes the mandated isolation from the pandemic problematic. Ragusa said many YES clients, lacking pre-Covid stress-relieving outlets and activities, tell her it is hard not to abuse substances at home.
“All the ways we would encourage them to cope are not allowed… The outlets that people normally have don’t exist,” said Cindy Wolff, executive director at Tempo Group, a Nassau family-oriented addiction prevention organization.
Mental health concerns
The realities of day-to-day life during the pandemic have worsened another aspect of life for those who struggle with SUDs — mental health issues, particularly anxiety and depression. For those who struggle with SUDs, “the impact of Covid is more profound… It’s just the reality of dealing with what is, for all intents and purposes, a mental health disorder during a time when what we’re being told to do is isolate and distance,” Wolff said. Epidemics lead to increased stress because of loneliness and other factors; this often leads to depression, anxiety and low self-esteem. In fact, more than one in every four adults with a serious mental health condition also has a substance use disorder. Individuals who struggle with SUD are hypersensitive to stress, often leading to relapse or the use of substances to cope. “People are just very fearful, and drugs and alcohol are a way to numb that,” Ragusa said. “The pandemic has increased a sense, for many, of fear,” LoPresti said. “For those perhaps already at risk for depression and anxiety, all the factors around the pandemic have compounded that… The desperation of community members, the intensity of needs, the level of distress has increased.”
“Emotional health is intrinsic to the physical health of our people and community,” she said.
“When you’re in recovery, just being able to have control over your day is one of the foundations to how people stay sober… For many, they got to a place where things in life are good and they have managed to learn how to stay sober in the world. Then this pandemic came and took all that away, leaving people scared and alone and with
limited resources for help,” Alvino said. “More people are suffering from depression and anxiety than before due to this pandemic.
Lost connections
For many, the key to recovery from both SUDs and opioid addiction is group meetings and in-person interaction with others, but the pandemic has put a pause on so much of this.
“There’s just so much relapsing happening because of the isolation,” Ragusa said. One reason why, she said, is the end of in-person group meetings. “People don’t feel as connected on Zoom.”
Isolated at home, many people are unable to interact with organizations that could provide help. “When people are isolated in their homes, they can’t reach out for help… they don’t have a safety net outside of their home to identify that they need help,” LoPresti said.
This has led to desperation and loss. “I’ve never lost this many friends before recovery… So many people are dying,” Ragusa said, adding, “especially earlier in the pandemic when there was no access to in-person meetings.” Group meetings are an integral part of the recovery process. “One of the most long-standing traditions in SUD treatment is self-help meetings… and a big part of that is the group experience, the power of the group… and during Covid, it’s a very different environment,” Wolff said, noting that isolation is the number one issue for people with SUDs during the pandemic. “Even with telehealth services, which saves lives, for people who were already struggling, it’s not the best substitute for in-person services,” Wolff said. Meetings over Zoom have not met this fundamental human need. “People need human interaction… Not having these things [has] a negative impact on everyone,” Alvino said.
“Most of us have been in a situation where we were down, and someone smiling at you just makes you feel better for a moment. These little things that help are now gone, and that makes it harder to get out of that negative space,” Alvino said. “The antidote to addiction really is connection,” Ragusa said. “When we get outside of ourselves and really connect with and help others, things really start to change.”
Addiction after Covid-19
“People who may not have recognized SUD as a problem in their life previously are now recognizing it,” Wolff said. “We were getting calls from people seeking services who were really more along in their illness than normally.” Local experts fighting substance abuse on the ground predicted a challenging future for Long Islanders. “I think everyone’s mental health has taken a battering… and we’ll see an increase in self-harm, suicide, overdoses,” Wolff said. Despite the dire situation, New York State and Nassau County instituted a 20 percent cut in substance-abuse resources during the first quarter of 2021, in addition to holds that were placed on resources in 2020.
HOW TO HELP
Check in with your neighbors who are isolating.
Keep an eye out for signs of mental health and substance abuse issues.
If you see anyone isolating or struggling with mental health, be open to talking with them. Reach out to local elected officials and let them know that you support restoring services and that mental health/ substance abuse services are essential services that need to be funded.
Point individuals in need to resources and organizations that can help.
Photo by Baker131313 - Wikimedia commons
LoPresti called the move “shortsighted.” New York and Nassau are yet to reveal if the cuts are temporary or permanent. She expects both the individuals affected and Long Island’s economy and society to feel the effects of this double crisis for a long time. “That’s what we’re very worried about — the long-term ripple effect of this pandemic,” LoPresti said.
Of more concern is the effect it will have on the life trajectory of those who struggle with SUDs and addiction in the long term. LoPresti worries that individuals coping with substances may not be able to return to a higher level of day-to-day functioning once society returns to normal. “When the world opens back up and they’re told they have to go back out there into the world and negotiate the social pressures and the dynamics of the world they live in,” LoPresti said, “it’s likely they’re not going to have the tools and the skills to do that.”
Ragusa stressed the importance of “sober references,” real-world experiences that teach someone with an SUD how to cope properly without the use of drugs or alcohol. “The more sober time you have under your belt,” she said, “the more sober references you have, the more tools you have in your toolbox, the easier it is to maintain longterm sobriety.”
Covid-19:
STUDENT STORIES
Alexis Sakil on campus at Stony Brook University. Photo courtesy of Alexis Sakil.
Long Island college students speak at length about the challenges they have faced during the pandemic.
BY ATHENA DAWSON
A normal day in the life of a college student before 2020 meant attending in-person classes, strolling around campus and hanging out with friends. However, in 2021, students have had to reimagine their college experiences because of Covid-19.
Alexis Sakil
Students must now take online classes, navigate who stays within their social bubbles and decide when to self-isolate, all while feeling the general fear of getting sick with Covid-19 and spreading it to their family members. Long Island students recently shared their experiences of how they have coped with the pandemic.
Alexis Sakil had major concerns at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Her family members were in a vulnerable state, as her father was sick with Covid-19 early on. Education was “in the back of my head,” she said, as she was more concerned with the health and safety of her family. The Stony Brook University junior is majoring in psychology and sociology, and had a rocky experience during the first stage of the pandemic. Sakil was “It was such a shock in shock when she learned she only had two days to for my mental health move off campus, describfor a while. I was ing the decline of her mental health during a period just struggling to get when the support system out of the room.” of her boyfriend and close friends was taken away. “It - Alexis Sakil was such a shock for my mental health for a while. I was just struggling to get out of the room. I was on my phone to do my work, and I was like, wow, this is so isolating,” she said. Alexis, like many other college students, lost job opportunities. Before the pandemic, she applied to be an event coordinator on campus, and lost the job because of the pandemic. She was, however, offered the job again when she returned to campus. For Alexis, it is hard to pinpoint if the pandemic has made her college experience better or worse. “I’m a part of three organizations on campus.... One of them is the step team, and we cannot meet or practice…. That kind of took away that whole aspect of my college life,” she said. In terms of her academics, the isolation of the pandemic has actually made Alexis’s grades improve, but “would I take improvement in my grades and all this over living life the way that I thought I was supposed to live? I don’t know,”she said. Alexis does say a positive throughout the whole experience has been having time to be closer with her parents. With her father being sick with Covid-19, the situation had, in her words, “put life into perspective.”
Zakria Khan
When Farmingdale State College junior Zakria Khan first heard about the pandemic a year ago, he was sitting in his morning history class while his professor speculated about whether the university would close. He never imagined he would still be in a pandemic a year later. “‘I’m 20 years old, and I’ve never had something like this happening where the world was shutting down,” he said. Khan is a double major in bioscience and mathematics, and as he switched to online learning, he said he worried about the integrity of his classes. College students do have opportunities to cheat, albeit with major consequences if caught, and Khan was concerned that his peers would take advantage of online learning in a less than honorable way. “Whenever they switched to online learning,” he said, “I was like... what are you doing here? Is everyone gonna be cheating? Because that’s the first thing that would pop into your head, you know?” Khan is, however, more optimistic than many, believing that mask wearing will eventually go away. Being a biology major, Khan has to take many labs that can become a hurdle with online classes. He describes his chemistry lab as normal because he mostly studies math equations. Biology labs, however, have been a struggle. “For biology, it was very, very hard,” Khan said. “I mean, they were asking us to do a virtual microscope and stuff. And I’m just like, how do we do that? It was so confusing.” Khan had a hard time adjusting from losing his job and filing for unemployment to then briefly moving back home to live with
Zakira Khan sits in his room while doing assignments on his tablet. Photo courtesy of Zakira Khan
his family, a space that he shares with seven other people. One of his biggest concerns was the health of his father, who has medical issues that could cause complications with Covid-19. “My dad’s a heart patient, and his heart is very weak in his system. It was very scary during the pandemic. I was just kind of worried that, you know, he was gonna get sick,” he said. “And then, if he was sick, I didn’t even know what to do, because there was already so much on my plate. And I was just, like, I take care of my siblings, and I, like, have to drop out of college. “ Although he believes online classes are not helping him to retain information, Kahn saw the opportunity to be more flexible and take his father to doctor’s appointments and help to support his family.
