Search Results
Psychosocial interview-based methodologies have been heavily reliant on what has been long been thought of as a talk-led encounter. Interest in walking as a research method has been driven by the ways in which it alters the research relationship through the kinetic and relational affordances of moving side by side while walking, which also brings place and space into the encounter. However, a walking interview is also an event that occurs in time and, in this article, we explore this temporality through an exploration of the fluctuations of tempo and rhythmicity in a mobile interview group. We draw on theories of communicative musicality, which have focused mainly on parent–infant exchanges, to explore often unconscious dimensions of group communication. We argue that mobile interviews work simultaneously through the temporal/musical and the visual/spatial registers and we develop this theme with reference to a case example taken from a study of the everyday lives of young men accessing an organisation for homeless people. The walking interview allowed for a shared reimagining of a young man’s biography as he escorted us through the scenes, settings and phases of his everyday life. We use this example to consider how the rhythmical aspects of walking together support the communicative musicality of the interview group. Our analysis provides a window onto the unspoken aspects of the interview process which significantly affect our interpretation.
This chapter offers a critical exploration of long-term recovery by exploring the relationship between policy, practice and lived experience. It draws on findings from a three-year Economic and Social Research Council–funded project which, between 2012 and 2016, explored the evidence base around the implementation of a recovery-oriented model of service provision in Lancashire, UK. The study generated a detailed understanding of the development of a new recovery-oriented model of care as well as a contextualised understanding of the lived experience of a number of people using substance-use treatment services.
The case study presented in the chapter explores one transgender woman’s ongoing struggles to address her substance use, to find employment and to feel accepted in the wider community. It argues that exploring the links between the micro level of lived experience, the meso level of practice and the macro level of policy is important for developing and honing our understanding of the lived effect of the implementation of recovery policy. One important value of biographical methods is that they can tease out the motivations and justifications of individuals, helping us to explore and understand the relationship between policy, practice and lived experience. Rustin (1991) argues that it is through the analysis of single cases that self-reflection, decision-making and action in human lives can best be explored and represented; the ontological assumption being that individual biographies make society and are not merely made by it. Hence, this chapter concludes by arguing that recovery as a policy storyline presents a resolution narrative for substance use which replaces the previous risk management one.
In this much-needed text, leading international experts explore crucial aspects of people’s experience of long-term recovery from substance use.
Centred around the voices of people who use substances, the book examines the complex and continuing needs of people who have sought to change their use of substances, investigating the ways in which personal characteristics and social and systemic factors intersect to influence the lives of people in long-term recovery. With perspectives from Sweden, Norway, Germany, Belgium, Iceland and the United Kingdom, it also considers the role and needs of family members, and puts forward clear recommendations for improving future research, policy and practice.
A great deal has been written in academic and popular forms about recovery from substance use. Far less has been written about long-term recovery. This long-term perspective is important in that it explicitly recognises and respects the long-term nature of the struggles many people with substance-use issues take on in pursuing, defining and realising their own recovery. This is a theme that runs throughout this edited collection, and we will hear powerful testimonies that illustrate those struggles. In this opening chapter we begin by introducing the concept of recovery, briefly addressing the history of the use of the term in the sector as well as some of the key definitional issues and debates. We move on to discussing the idea of long-term recovery, introducing our ideas about why a durational or time-based view of recovery might be both limiting for our understanding of recovery but also important for defending an ethic of care and valuing person-centred change. We explore the importance of the voices of those with lived experience, arguing that the value of many of the stories in this book is in how they link the particularities of people’s lived experience of recovery with the systems and structures in which people live. In this respect, the breadth of the people and places covered in the collection is a key strength.
The use of alcohol or other drugs, hereafter ‘substances’, is documented throughout history. Gossop (2000, p 1) suggests ‘people have always used drugs to alter their states of consciousness’, and over the centuries, the joys and pitfalls of substance use have been explored and expressed in a range of forms including art, literature, social research and personal testimony.
A key strength of this edited collection is the diversity of experiences it reflects, both in the ways in which it explores how recovery has been adopted in seven different nations, as well as the ways in which recovery is experienced by a range of different groups of people. Many of the chapters are based on empirical research, and all make reference to the voices of people with lived experience. In this concluding section, we seek to consider some of the important elements of learning we, as editors, see emerging from it, as well as to identify issues and questions we see as requiring more attention in future research and writing on the subject. In the introduction we began by looking back at how the idea of recovery has become a central facet of policy and practice in many different national contexts in recent years. In this concluding chapter we reflect on the idea of long-term recovery, considering whether this collection of work manages to register anything distinctive about the ways in which this term is important and useful, and if using the language of ‘long term’ offers any new and important ways of considering and conceiving of recovery. Further, it draws out key messages from and for people with lived experience who were partners and/or participants in the empirical research the chapters are based on, as well as presenting implications for policy, practice and future research.
The fact that the language and idea of recovery has been adopted in so many different national contexts in the same era demonstrates just how persuasive and plausible the idea of recovery has proved to be as a seemingly new direction for substance-use policy and practice.
