Clubhouse virtual programming: A trend analysis of member engagement patterns before, during, and after pandemic lockdown.

Objective: The COVID-19 pandemic had a profound impact on the mental health of individuals with serious mental illness, with restricting social gatherings and limiting access to essential community and psychosocial support services. For programs like clubhouses, adapting typically in-person programming to online settings led to the creation of virtual clubhouse programming that persists at many sites even after reopening. Although it has been documented how clubhouses adapted their programming online, it has not been investigated at the individual level how those programs were utilized over time, by different member cohorts, and how they persist in comparison to one another.

Method: The present article presents descriptive and inferential statistics, analysis of variance, and secondary trend analysis of the Fountain House clubhouse in-person and virtual engagements of three member cohorts who enrolled in either three time periods before pandemic restrictions (the prior cohort), during pandemic restrictions (the pandemic cohort), and after lockdown restrictions (the reopening cohort).

Result: Initial findings show that the prior cohort sustained their overall rate of engagement across time periods. The pandemic cohort had a significantly higher rate of engagement than the prior cohort within the during period but demonstrated a significant decrease in engagement rate between the during and after period. Prior and pandemic cohorts had statistically similar virtual and in-person engagement ratios in the after period, but the reopen cohort differed significantly with a predominant ratio of in-person engagements.

Conclusions and implications for practice: Member engagement trends within in-person and virtual offerings across the three different pandemic related time periods indicate important considerations for the sustainability and innovation of clubhouse virtual programming. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).