‘Anything You Need, You Can Find it’: How Adults in Substance Use Recovery Build Recovery Capital on Social Media

AIMS: This study explored the perspectives of adults in substance use recovery about obtaining and strategically building recovery capital on social media. METHODS: substance use treatment centers in the northeast and southeast US. Most identified as female (59.2%) and White (57.1%), with an average age of 39.09 years (SD = 10.06). Most (77.6%) reported receiving treatment for alcohol use, and almost half had received treatment for cannabis (49.0%). We used semi-structured interviews focused on the perspectives of adults in recovery about their motivations and the positive and negative impacts of their social media use. FINDINGS: Participants' descriptions of recovery capital built on social media were organized in four thematic categories based on the type of capital: Human Recovery Capital (e.g., Online information/content), Physical Recovery Capital (e.g., Instrumental support), Social Recovery Capital (e.g., Emotional support), and Cultural/Community Recovery Capital (e.g., Online peer recovery communities). We also coded instances of Negative Recovery Capital (e.g., Negative/deceptive content) across domains and characterized a variety of Strategies to Gain Recovery Capital (e.g., Disclosing their recovery journey at specific times online). CONCLUSIONS: Social media can provide access to recovery capital, especially human and social capital, with little effort expenditure, and online contexts may allow more strategic disclosure of concealable stigmatized identities, such as being in recovery. However, adults must also navigate online content and connections perceived as harmful to their recovery journey.