Socialization networks and identities of novel psychoactive substance users (original) (raw)
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The social constructions of drug users in professional interventions
Journal of Social Work Practice, 2011
This qualitative study analyses the construction of a subject who uses drugs (injected drugs) so as to offer psychosocial proposals for social healthcare interventions within this collective, and thereby contribute to social healthcare policies that optimise treatment for drug use. The results indicate that identity is connected to positions that are activated in interactions and relationships between users and professionals in various day-to-day contexts of healthcare and treatment. We have labelled these activated positions: therapeutic, drug-sensory, consumerist, legal-repressive and group-community. Understanding them provides clues that may improve interventions in health and legal contexts. These clues include understanding the tensions between the subject and the substance, considering the stigmatised image and identity, and supporting the idea of the existence of dilemmas in users and professionals, as this may allow transformations to occur in the mutual relationships that are established.
Migrating Identities: the Relational Constitution of Drug Use and Addiction
Sociology of health & illness, 2007
This paper aims to develop a properly social conceptualisation of addiction through drawing on analyses of rich, in-depth data from ex/users of heroin. Practices of addiction are considered as in and of themselves constitutive of particular identities, ways of being, and ways of being with and for others. The discussion seeks to demonstrate how heroin use is predicated upon, and productive of, purposeful drug-using relationships in which users produce and reproduce the conditions for continued use ( e.g. scoring, grafting, using). Accordingly, the concept of 'dependence' is here reconfigured to encompass both dependence on the provision (and ingestion) of drugs and, simultaneously, dependence upon diverse configurations of users, clinicians, support workers, and so on. The paper makes a critical departure from existing debates in which addiction, even if conceived as a social practice, is nonetheless understood at the level of 'the individual'. It is argued that this tendency towards ontological individualism leads towards conceiving the problem of addiction as residing predominantly in the individual negotiation and, ultimately, resolution of identity narratives. The analyses presented here explore how the migration from addict to non-addict involves more than identity work. Theorisations of the level of 'field' or 'configuration' are developed, and considered as both a level of analysis and a conceptual lens for understanding changes in the ongoing, relational, practices involved in such identity migration. Finally, the consequences of intersecting, relational, dimensions of time horizons, place and space in the talk of ex/users are considered for strategies for successful recovery, identified during the research.
Identity and the Social Construction of Risk: Injecting Drug Use
Sociology of Health & Illness, 1999
The links between risk-taking, identity and social context were examined in interviews with 20 young injecting drug users. Young men proclaimed accounts of identity either as 'recreational users' with the heroic personal characteristics to control their drug use, or as 'junkies' with traits of sensual hedonism leading inevitably to ever-increasing drug use. Young women's accounts were of themselves as 'junkies' driven to drug use by psychological pain and addictive personality. Drawing upon individualised explanations of behaviour, these discourses of self identity could nevertheless be seen to be linked to specific social practices: recreational users reported solidarities to maintain low drug use whereas the social scene of 'junkies' was not organised around such solidarities. Those who oscillated between recreational use and habitual use had moved across these different social contexts. Theories and practical strategies for harm minimisation, which recognise these relationships between selfidentity, social context and behaviour, are called for.
Frontiers in Psychiatry, 2021
There are multiple discourses on addictions that influence the way in which relatives interpret the substance use of a family member. The purpose of this study is to understand the influence of these discourses on the construction of use as a problem by relatives of people in recovery. Narratives were obtained on the path of the illness to identify the phases in the construction of use as a problem and the influence of the discourses on each phase. The process has four successive phases: normalization, impasse, exasperation, and adoption of the treatment ideology. This process goes from the legitimization of use to its moral interpretation and subsequently to the transition to medical discourse. It is concluded that it is important to reduce the influence of the moral discourse in order to facilitate timely detection and early care, as well as to design interventions focused on the reconstruction of use as a problem.
While much has been made of the governmentality evinced in drug policy, its effects on people who use drugs have received less attention. Scholars who have investigated these effects commonly focus on the views and experiences of individuals receiving treatment for their drug use, often reporting an explicit desire among individuals in treatment for a return to a normal, healthy life. Many authors trace this desire to the normalisation inherent in drug policy, and the governmentality involved in the delivery of drug treatment more directly. This article adds to these discussions by shifting focus from the experience of individuals in treatment to those out of treatment settings. In so doing, we aim to develop a more nuanced understanding of how heavy drug users negotiate power, governmentality and the modulations of health and illness in the course of everyday life. We ground our discussion in qualitative research conducted in Melbourne, Australia, with 31 current methamphetamine consumers. We argue that regular methamphetamine consumption involves a complex and ambivalent relationship with the ideas of health and normal life, imposing as well as reflecting a form of estrangement between its consumers and mainstream (or normal) society. This ambivalence has important implications for the delivery of health and social services among methamphetamine consumers, insofar as the restoration of normal health and the reintegration of former drug users into mainstream society are typical health service goals. We address some of these policy implications by way of conclusion.
Into the unknown: Treatment as a social arena for drug users’ transition into a non-using life
Nordic Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, 2018
Background and aims: For people trying to stop using alcohol or other drugs (AOD), the process is often characterised by periods of abstinence followed by relapse into their previous drug-related way of life and subsequent re-entry into the treatment system. There is a call for greater attention to the how of these transitions, with a special focus on the phase of leaving treatment. The aim of this article was to get a better understanding of the transformation of practice when moving from a drug-using to a non-using lifestyle by exploring the experience of (1) the involvement in treatment settings, (2) the process of leaving treatment, and finally, (3) the early phase of changing everyday practice into a drug-free way of living. Method: The article takes on a social practice approach, in particular Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, "doxa" and field to analyse 17 in-depth interviews with Norwegian men and women seeking treatment for problems resulting from the use of drugs and/or alcohol. Results: The study shows that the support of professionals operates as transitional relations that can bridge the transformation from a drug-using to a drugfree life, by providing a social web of relations, positions, settings and activities. However, leaving
New narratives, new selves: Complicating addiction in online alcohol and other drug resources
Within the expansive qualitative literature on alcohol and other drug (AOD) use, knowledge of lived experiences of AOD addiction is limited. Much of the existing scholarship reifies addiction as a calamitous state, and pathologises those believed to be experiencing it. Such research discounts the many ways people live with regular AOD use and is unable to tell us much about how addiction emerges through, rather than precedes, people’s experiences and understandings of it. This article draws on the theoretical literature on the production of social problems and the concept of “ontological politics” to introduce an innovative approach to understanding lived experiences of AOD addiction. Applying this literature to a critical analysis of personal narratives from two Australian AOD websites, we demonstrate how addiction is conceived narrowly in these narratives as a disorder of compulsion, amenable to treatment. Not only does this conception reproduce unhelpful assumptions about addiction, it also reifies it as a stable, unified entity, the boundaries of which are fixed. Against this familiar account, we conceive addiction as an emergent, fiercely contested phenomenon, constituted in part through the very measures designed to treat it. This shift in focus allows an innovation in engaging with addiction, which is being pursued in a new Australian research project: the development of a public website presenting lived experiences of addiction that will be (1) a means of challenging existing public discourses, and (2) an intervention in the social production of addiction. The article concludes by considering the politics of this approach and how it might reshape addiction.
Entangled Identities and Psychotropic Substance Use
Sociology of health & …, 2004
This paper reports the findings of a grounded theory study investigating drug users' concerns and experiences of their oral health. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how the findings relate to various strands of literature which focus on processes and discourses of recovery from problematic drug use (biographical reconstruction), the chronic illness literature (biographical disruption), public/private discourses and the myth of addiction. Data were collected from four focus groups containing a total of 25 participants, and 15 in-depth interviews. Participants were recruited from drug detoxification programmes (27), recovery units following detoxification (9) and a drug rehabilitation unit (4). Data analysis revealed that the core concern of drug users' was talking about the 'entangled' nature of their identity whilst they were on drugs. Such 'entangled identities' emerged through what appeared to be a gradual sedimentation process of drug-using habits and routines that replaced those of the everyday self. Other concerns were distancing one's self from the drug using self (involving expressions of disgust) and recovery processes (disentangling). The paper discusses each of these core problems in the light of the literature on the recovery from drug use, the chronic illness literature and the myth of addiction. It concludes by briefly reflecting on problematic psychotropic substance use as another form of biographical disruption formed on the basis of a dialectic between private discourses of the entangled self and public discourses of addiction. It suggests that further work should be conducted in these areas.