Diffracting addicting binaries: An analysis of personal accounts of alcohol and other drug ‘addiction’

Abstract

Associated with social and individual harm, loss of control and destructive behaviour, addiction is widely considered to be a major social problem. Most models of addiction, including the influential disease model, rely on the volition/compulsion binary, conceptualising addiction as a disorder of compulsion. In order to interrogate this prevailing view, this article draws on qualitative data from interviews with people who describe themselves as having an alcohol or other drug 'addiction', 'dependence' or 'habit'. Applying the concept of 'diffraction' elaborated by science studies scholar Karen Barad, we examine the process of 'addicting', or the various ways in which addiction is constituted, in accounts of daily life with regular alcohol and other drug use. Our analysis suggests not only that personal accounts of addiction exceed the absolute opposition of volition/compulsion but also that the polarising assumptions of existing addicting discourses produce many of the negative effects typically attributed to the 'disease of addiction'.

Lives of Substance: a mixed-method evaluation of a public information website on addiction experiences

“…There is a global move towards recognising the impact of research and reflecting the multiple ways in which knowledge is generated and used, beyond traditional academic measures (Greenhalgh, Raftery, Hanney, & Glover, 2016). While this research project also produced traditional academic outputs (Dilkes-Frayne, Pienaar et al, 2015;Pienaar et al, 2016), livesofsubstance.org was its main public output: aimed at a wider audience and with the aim of intervening in public understandings of addiction. The question of how to evaluate these efforts is a challenging one.…”

Drugs, Brains and Other Subalterns: Public Debate and the New Materialist Politics of Addiction

“…. While many of those who have lived with heavy drug consumption, been diagnosed or labelled addicted or dependent, been expelled from families, lost jobs and been exiled from mainstream society in serving custodial sentences, understandably embrace the possibility of entry or re-entry into the predetermined common world, many do not (Moore and Fraser, 2006;Pienaar et al, 2017). They may never take up the invitation to appeal their exclusion, either as reformed or even as unreformed.…”

‘We’re Gonna Be Addressing Your Pepsi Use’

“…In particular, the emphasis on accounting for MMT's material characteristics is supported by Fraser and Valentine's call for analyses that incorporate 'both the social/cultural/discursive and the material' (2008,21). It is similarly linked to deconstructive accounts of addiction narratives that demonstrate how the phenomenon of 'addiction' resists categorization through binaries like health/sick; normal/pathological; addict/recovered addict Fomiatti et al 2017;Pienaar et al 2017). Such accounts were used by the treatment providers in this study, oftentimes to construct patients as disordered, and themselves as experts.…”