Mind the Gap! Failure in Understanding Key Dimensions of a Drug User's Life

Abstract

This article discusses the failure to succeed in the treatment of the heterogeneous population of substance users, in terms of too little, or a total absence of, necessary available knowledge from an ethnographic perspective of the user's mental geographies. I suggest three dimensions that are critical to be knowledgeable about at the beginning planning stages of any intervention and on any level of policy, namely, insights into time, space, and bodily perceptions of drug users. In these scopes, barriers are drawn and upheld between caregiver and intervention planners, on the one hand, and the client, on the other. In cases when treatment has proven successful, however success is defined, the gap between the addict's mental geography and the surrounding world has been overcome to some degree. Previous research in the area of substance users’ perspective of time, space, and body, and estimates of its value for success in and posttreatment, support, and care of people with severe drug-use-related problems, are discussed.

Keywords :

• mental geography
• space
• time
• drug users
• embodiment
• temporal perceptions
• treatment settings infrastructure

Notes

1 The reader is referred to Hills's criteria for causation that were developed in order to help assist researchers and clinicians determine if risk factors were causes of a particular disease or outcomes or merely associated (Hill, A. B. (1965).

2 ZTPI is a self-reported test made up of 56 items in the form of statements. For each question, the respondent has to answer choosing the most appropriate of the five available options for the level of agreement. Original source: Zimbardo and Boyd (1999).

3 The interested reader is referred to the

online PLoS Medicine Disease Mongering Collection, Editor's note.