The crossover of family cohesion and conflict on patient and support person’s mental health.

Family members can significantly impact recovery from opioid use disorder (OUD), but their role and the impact that OUD plays are understudied.Research often focuses on individual patient outcomes, neglecting the dynamic between family members.Understanding this crossover between individuals can inform family-level interventions to enhance OUD treatment.The present study examined the crossover between relationship quality and mental health among patients in OUD treatment and their support person (SP).We also examined how concordance within the dyad on perceived relationship quality affected mental health at baseline and over 3 months.Participants were 219 buprenorphine patients (58% male, 62% White) and their SPs (family [22%], partner [31%], friend [47%]; 72% female, 62% White) recruited from five community health centers providing outpatient OUD treatment.Each member of the dyad provided data on their perceived level of cohesion and conflict within the relationship and symptoms related to anxiety and depression at baseline and 3-month follow-up.High cohesion and low conflict in patient-SP dyads were linked to reduced mental health severity (p < .05) at baseline.Concordant dyads, even if reporting agreement on high conflict or low cohesion, showed even lower mental health symptoms at baseline ( p < .001)and a greater rate of clinical improvement in mental health at follow-up (p < .05)than discordant dyads.This study emphasizes the influence that patients and SPs can have on each other's mental health and how concordance on their ratings of relationship quality can alleviate mental health symptoms.These findings offer insights into how the relationship can be leveraged to understand and tailor treatments that are supportive of both. Public Significance StatementFamily members and patients can play an important role in each other's mental health outcomes.Clinical interventions for patients with opioid use disorder may consider integrating family members into the course of treatment to better understand levels of conflict and cohesion and how concordance on relationship quality affects dyadic outcomes.