Turning points in addiction careers: five case studies

Building Recovery Capital: The Role of "Hitting Bottom" in Desistance and Recovery from Substance Abuse and Crime

The aim of this article is to explore the role of "hitting bottom" as a motivation to initiate a recovery process and desistance from crime and substance use disorders (SUDs), and in building recovery capital (RC). Researchers and practitioners have long been interested in why and how offenders desist from crime. Desistance and recovery from crime and SUDs have also been linked to negative turning points, such as hitting bottom, which represents multidimensional suffering with physiological, familial, social, and criminal implications. The deleterious outcomes of SUDs cause individuals to lose their social and personal resources and hit bottom. According to the conservation of resources model, in the context of actual or potential loss of resources, individuals strive to maintain, protect, and build them. Thus, hitting bottom not only provides the initial motivation for change, but also drives individuals to build personal resources. The prospects for successful recovery are dependent upon the individual's personal and social resources, or RC. This article represents a first step in examining the role of hitting bottom in building RC in the process of long-term recovery. The conclusions may have theoretical as well as practical implications.

Former heavy drinkers' multiple narratives of recovery

Aim

This article explores the multiplicity of former heavy drinkers' narratives. The focus lies on turning points from heavy drinking among people who have recovered through self-change and among those who recovered by participating in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings.

Design

We conducted 42 qualitative interviews with media-recruited informants in 2009–2013. The interviews allowed the respondents to narrate their life histories of drinking and quitting drinking, including accounts of causality and order of events.

Results

These narratives are enactments shaped in the practice and context in which they were experienced. It is argued that the multiplicity of drinking narratives results not only from the fact that people have different experiences while drinking nor only from different people having different ways of recovering from a problematic consumption. The multiplicity is also the result of the very enactment of recovering and the lives lived after the recovery. The multiplicity is created in practice and is revealed in the narratives.

Conclusions

The narratives and the enactment of the narratives of one's past, present and future that occur when making momentous changes in one's life – such as stopping drinking – are all essential for the process of quitting alcohol and the life to be lived hereafter. We should therefore pay more attention to the multiplicity that is created in the enactment of narratives in the process of recovery.

The global research neglect of unassisted smoking cessation: causes and consequences

Simon Chapman and Ross MacKenzie review the evidence and argue that health promotion messages should emphasize that the most successful method used by most ex-smokers is unassisted cessation.

Is Ricoeur's Notion of Narrative Identity Useful in Understanding Recovery in Drug Addicts?

From Ricoeur's narrative theory, we argue that drug addicts may particularly need the help of literature, in a broad sense- fiction, history, and also specialized literature on addiction-to make their lives intelligible, to construct their identities, and to be able to change. Their need for this popular and professional literature concerns the numerous theories in the field of addiction. This literature is encountered indirectly by patients via interaction with professionals. It reflects attempts on the part of practitioners to find turning points in their patients' life stories, as in the mimesis circle described by Ricoeur. Our hypothesis is therefore explored in the light of certain sociological and psychiatric models that plot patients' lives, especially in the recovery period. The risks of a noncritical appropriation of this literature are discussed. Indeed, patients may hesitate between several identification models, loss of identity, and identity withdrawal.