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Are You Truly a Recovering Dope Fiend? Local Interpretive Practices at a Therapeutic Community Drug Treatment Program
Author(s) -
Paik Leslie
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
symbolic interaction
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.874
H-Index - 47
eISSN - 1533-8665
pISSN - 0195-6086
DOI - 10.1525/si.2006.29.2.213
Subject(s) - therapeutic community , construct (python library) , set (abstract data type) , participant observation , anger , psychology , ethnography , skepticism , social psychology , sociology , qualitative research , addiction , process (computing) , psychotherapist , public relations , epistemology , computer science , social science , political science , psychiatry , philosophy , anthropology , programming language , operating system
Previous qualitative research on treatment programs for drug addiction/alcoholism has primarily focused on those processes whereby participants are expected to construct a new sense of self according to institutional parameters. The present article builds on that research and explores how contemporary programs attempt to resolve the problem that it is almost impossible to tell if someone has engaged in this self‐construction process. Informed by five months of ethnographic fieldwork at an adult residential drug treatment facility, the article asks: under what circumstances do program members call into doubt a client's efforts to create an institutional self, and how do they express this skepticism? The article reveals that staff and clients employ a set of local interpretive practices about community and emotions to assess whether clients are constructing the institutional self of a “recovering dope fiend.” It specifically considers how they interpret a client's emotional displays to represent that client's current self under construction. That is, a client's ability to control anger appropriately or to handle anxiety demonstrates s/he is effectively “doing the program” of self‐construction.