In this blog article, the author shares his experiences thus far on the road to becoming an alcohol and drugs worker.

In this paper I demonstrate the way in which people's beliefs about the aetiology of their particular affliction (arthritis) need to be understood as part of a more comprehensive imaginative enterprise which I refer to as narrative reconstruction. The intrinsically teleological form of this enterprise means that identified 'causes' represent only putative efficient connexions between the disease and antecedent factors but also narrative reference points between the individual and society in an unfolding process which has become profoundly disrupted. Through the presentation of case material taken from lengthy interviews I illustrate the way in which my question to the subjects about the cause of their disease: 'Why do you think you got arthritis?' was translated by them into a narrative reconstruction of their changing relationship to the world in which they live and the genesis of illness within it.

First-person accounts of life-threatening or terminal illness appear frequently in the academic literature and in the media. This paper takes up the question of how these accounts might provide, for their authors, a sense of coherence and freedom, and for their readers a grasp of suffering and its potential. By focusing upon the `horrors' integral to such accounts, the argument is made that such horrors are basic to the sufferer's symbolisation of an illness-world. This world, rather like the adventure, is torn from life, grounded in the sensuous fragments through which its elusory powers are expressed. Seen as the problematisation of life as a work of freedom, the illness account can then be analysed as an aesthetic project. The paper discusses this proposal, distinguishing between aesthetics and aestheticisation as social phenomena. It uses this distinction to make a critical observation upon attempts to understand suffering in the modern world in terms of power or of myth.

Narrative inquiry was used to explore the meaning of nicotine addiction among teenage girls, age 14 to 17 years, who had recent experience with smoking. The following three narratives emerged: invincibility, giving in, and unanticipated addiction. Those who told a story of invincibility depicted how they were in control of their smoking and not addicted. Participants who gave accounts of giving in to smoking described yielding to external forces. In the narrative of unanticipated addiction, participants recounted their surprise at realizing that they were addicted. Two subnarratives, needing to quit and repeating history, were also uncovered. The study findings reveal the importance of semantics and identity issues as teenage girls talked about nicotine addiction. Listening to their stories is paramount in continued efforts in the reduction of tobacco consumption.

The article gives a review of the last ten years' of research on illness narratives, and organises this research around certain central themes. Four aspects of illness narratives are discussed: 1. a proposed typology giving three different kinds of illness narratives – illness as narrative, narrative about illness, and narrative as illness; 2. considerations of what can be accomplished with the help of illness narratives; 3. problems connected with how illness narratives are organised; and 4. the social context of telling and its influence on the narrative. It is argued that as social scientists we can use illness narratives as a means of studying not only the world of biomedical reality, but also the illness experience and its social and cultural underpinnings.

This study examines: what addiction narratives can tell us about the effects of using psychoactive addictive substances; whether addiction narratives can tell us anything about the psychoactive substances of the future; whether such narratives indicate which kinds of intervention might be successful in preventing addiction

Scientists and medical practitioners are taking an interest in narratives that can tell us directly about the experience of drug users and the effectiveness of treatments for addiction and the abuse of psychoactive substances.

AIMS: The purpose of this study was to look for the ways in which people who have recovered from various addictions understand and present their change process. MATERIALS: The research material consisted of 51 autobiographical stories of people who had been able to quit their addiction to alcohol, multiple drugs, binge eating, smoking, sex and gambling. METHODS: The basic logic of each narrative was first defined. The narratives were then categorized according to what they presented as the key to recovery. Composite stories were then constructed and analysed with regard to their emotional, causal, moral and ethical meanings. FINDINGS: The analysis revealed five different story types among these self-narratives: the AA story, the growth story, the co-dependence story, the love story and the mastery story. All of them helped to make the addiction and recovery understandable, they released the protagonist from guilt and had a happy ending by which the values of the story were realized. Each story type was told predominantly by representatives of a particular gender and addiction. CONCLUSIONS: As there are several ways out of addictive behaviours there are also several ways to construe the change. People who try to quit addictive behaviours could be encouraged to make full use of the cultural stock of stories in creating an account that fits their own experience of defeating their particular addiction.

Access to autobiographical knowledge about the self, such as recalling past dissociative experiences, appears to be drug state-dependent in both normal controls and detoxified alcoholic volunteers. Normal controls and detoxified alcoholic volunteers completed the Dissociative Experiences Scale on 2 different occasions, once following the administration of 0.375 mg of triazolam and once after placebo treatment (in a random crossover design). Both normal control and alcoholic volunteers reported twice as many instances of past dissociative experiences when retrieval occurred in a triazolam altered state compared with remembering following placebo administration. Many classes of drugs provide discriminative cues for eliciting behavior, as well a provide a context that determined what aspects of knowledge (i.e., autobiographical experiences) are retrieved from memory.