New narratives, new selves: Complicating addiction in online alcohol and other drug resources

Abstract

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.

• Addiction narratives
• AOD interventions
• social production of problems
• ontological politics
• online AOD resources
• subjectivity

Acknowledgments

The research on which this article was based was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant (DP140100996). The project is based at Curtin University's National Drug Research Institute (NDRI), which is supported by funding from the Australian Government under the Substance Misuse Prevention and Service Improvements Grants Fund. The study is a collaboration with Healthtalk Australia (http://healthtalkaustralia.org), Monash University and the University of New South Wales' Centre for Social Research in Health (CSRH). CSRH is supported by a grant from the Australian Department of Health. Suzanne Fraser is funded by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (FT120100215). The authors wish to thank the reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this piece.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the article.

Notes

¹Although the terms “narrative” and “story” are often used interchangeably, we use “narrative” to designate both the chain of events (“story”) and the means by which it is communicated (“discourse”) (Herman, 2004). In doing so, our aim is not to reiterate a rigid story/discourse distinction; rather we recognise their mutual constitution and, especially for our purposes, the ways in which narratives, like any other discursive practice, produce certain realities.