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Short abstract:

This paper addresses the turn to trauma-informed care in alcohol and other drug treatment. Drawing on feminist scholarship on critical care and biopolitics, it considers the logics of trauma-informed care, drawing attention to its potentially stigmatising effects for marginalised people.

Long abstract:

Trauma-informed care is an increasingly common approach in alcohol and other drug (AOD) treatment in Australia and internationally. It developed as a gender-specific approach for women designed to facilitate long-term recovery from both addiction and trauma. Given these feminist origins and popular formulations of care as synonymous with femininity and altruism, trauma-informed care has been embraced as a positive development in AOD treatment. Yet vital questions concerning how trauma-informed care cares, for whom and under what conditions warrant closer attention. In this paper we explore these issues through an analysis of interviews with Australian stakeholders working in trauma-informed AOD policy, research and treatment. Drawing on feminist scholarship on ‘critical care’ (Martin et al., 2015; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011) and related work on biopolitics, we treat trauma-informed care as a biopolitical technology of the social that can set in motion stigmatising formations of despair and deficit. Stakeholder accounts suggest that while it can sensitise practitioners and consumers to connections between trauma and AOD-related issues, it also draws on gendered, racialised and carceral logics to pathologise already marginalised people as vulnerable and in need of medical and/or state intervention. Given that trauma-informed AOD treatment can materialise as coercive and complicit with biomedical forms of pathologisation and surveillance, we argue that attention or ‘critical care’ must be paid to the biopolitical conditions and subjectifying effects of trauma-informed care.