Paper short abstract:

Rehabilitation from drug addiction often involves reflection on the addict's life story, which is usually portrayed as entangled with substance abuse. What happens when the script is flipped, and the addict tries to bend the rules of rehabilitation and reappropriate their life story?

Paper long abstract:

In the widespread representation of addiction as a moral failing, one of the tasks of the addict in rehabilitation is to re-evaluate their life, to pinpoint the how and the why of substance abuse, and what to change of themselves to «become a better person», a prerequisite for sobriety. But the sometimes-unspoken, sometimes-explicit rules of rehabilitation assign the responsibility of addiction to the addict: if drug use is a choice, and if such choice is the defining factor of addiction, then other factors are incidental.

However, the push towards reflexivity leaves the door oper for subjects to reappropriate their life narrative and re-shape the meaning of rehabilitation. Drawing both from my research in and my recent work with local public health services in Tuscany (Italy), this paper aims to explore how addicts negotiate their life stories throughout the rehabilitation process. My interest is twofold. On one hand, how these subjects navigate institutional spaces and define themselves in accordance with – or in opposition to – hegemonic narratives on addiction. On the other, how the focus on personal responsibility in spaces such as self-help groups is articulated in the different narratives subjects construct on themselves. If rehabilitation, as Jarrett Zigon (2011) suggests, is a process of re-creating one’s subjectivity, then the struggle for the control of one’s life story is also the struggle for the possibility of determining the roots – and trajectories of growth – of this new subjectivity.