Yours, Mine, or Ours?

Lately, I have been thinking more about the idea of substance use rehabilitation and the reality of substance use treatment. What is it that is being treated? Or, is it the question, what are people seeking help for or help with? What is the goal? I wonder what the value of asking people the question: why are you here? And, not re-working or massaging the answer to that question. I wonder what we could learn from asking these questions:

1) If the service is provider referred asking, what is the reason for referral?

2) At the point of the person’s entry to a service, asking, what do you hope to gain from this?

3) Periodically, during, at transition points and at regular intervals, what is different now?

4) Mapping out the journey.

5) Letting the person have input into the mapping of this journey.

Are we co-construct this? And, if yes, how do we capture that?

Is there an expectation that a persons engagement and journey in a service will be transformative? And, how do we judge this? Do we help people judge this?

Peace,

Michelle Danda

One response to “Yours, Mine, or Ours?”

  1. The Liz Cave Avatar

    I think you may be interested in the work of Todd Meyers, specifically The Clinic and Elsewhere. It is an ethnography that grew out of a clinical trial which investigate the efficacy of using suboxone over methadone with young patients in residential treatment. It is a theoretically and methodologically rich exploration of how patients’ take up, resist and transform “the therapeutic economy, where new markets, transactions of care, and highly porous conceptions of success and failure come together to shape addiction and recovery.”
    http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/books/MEYCLI.html

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