Dyadic association between support persons’ attitudes towards medication for opioid use disorder and patients’ mental health outcomes

This longitudinal dyadic study of 356 patient–support person pairs found that increases in support persons' stigmatizing attitudes toward buprenorphine were significantly associated with worse depressive and anxiety symptoms among patients with opioid use disorder at 3-month follow-up. Patients whose support person's stigma increased had the highest estimated probability of clinically significant depression (36.7%) and anxiety (33.3%). Findings suggest that reducing stigma toward medication for OUD among patients' loved ones could be a meaningful target for improving patient mental health outcomes.