Narrative Resistance: Peer Supporters Experiences of Co-optation, Isolation, and Exploitation in Addiction Services and Its Impact on Their Wholistic Health

As I worked from the comfort of my home beginning in March 2020, I provided supervision to peer support workers (PS) who worked on the front lines providing addiction services. As people began dying from COVID-19, people continued dying from fentanyl poisoning, so more PS were hired to work in safe injection sites (Consumption, and Treatment Centres), motels, and make-shift shelters. PSs were asked to perform the work of social workers because, like me, they were privileged to work from the safety of their homes. Due to COVID-19, PS found themselves working at intersecting homelessness and drug-using communities; the PS landscape rapidly changed. In fact, it seemed the more precarious the PS job, the more vulnerable the PS was, working in uncertain times, in uncertain conditions, and being placed in uncertain spaces. I am a doctoral student whose dissertation is focused on exploring PS experiences of co-optation, isolation, and exploitation in addiction services and its impact on their wholistic health. Research has highlighted these concerns without attention being paid to the implications for PS, and I believe the pandemic served to intensify these experiences. This poster presentation shed light on how these experiences impacted PS wholistic health and what it is like to work in the current climate of both the opioid crisis and the pandemic. I am proposing a critical narrative inquiry to gather these stories from PS who have worked in the front lines of addiction services in Southwestern Ontario through the pandemic.