Acceptance and Compassion to Enhance Self-care Pilot

Innovative approaches are needed to optimize the benefits of treatment as prevention (TasP) among HIV+ substance users, who experience profound health disparities that amplify onward transmission risk. This project will systematically develop, refine and conduct an open pilot to assess the feasibility and acceptability of a two-phase emotion regulation intervention that targets emotional barriers to HIV-related self-care among individuals who endorse active substance use. Emotional barriers such as shame and internalized stigma have been identified as barriers to optimal HIV care among individuals struggling with HIV and substance use. To effectively implement TasP, strategies for addressing these barriers are needed. Utilizing transdiagnostic approaches (e.g., positive affect-focused emotional regulation, mindfulness and self-compassion) investigators will develop, refine and pilot a two-phase emotional regulation intervention that requires only 5 face-to-face hours and can ultimately be implemented by a case-management-level staff person or trained peer educator. The first phase of the intervention will be a multicomponent in-person intervention targeting emotional, cognitive and behavioral barriers to HIV self-care behaviors among HIV+ substance users. The second phase of the intervention will extend the intervention benefits by sending personalized positive self-reappraisal text messages in response to text message queries about participants' mood. This phase will use an innovative personalized bi-directional platform, which will leverage an existing text message delivery system. This project will be instrumental in developing a relatively low-resource intervention strategy to address unmet emotional barriers to optimal HIV-care among individuals who are actively using substances. This work will provide the necessary pilot data for a subsequent grant submission to assess the preliminary efficacy of the intervention. The resulting intervention has the potential t