Skip to main content

Research Repository

Advanced Search

Traumatic landscapes: Two geographies of addiction

Proudfoot, J.

Traumatic landscapes: Two geographies of addiction Thumbnail


Authors



Abstract

The confluence of the contemporary opioid crisis and the fallout from the Great Recession has renewed interest in theories of addiction that can account for the relationship between individual symptoms and large-scale socio-political forces. Gesler's (1992) theory of ‘therapeutic landscapes,’ examines the ways that social, political, and cultural forces, embedded in place, contribute to health and wellbeing. This article considers the inverse of the therapeutic landscape: the traumatic landscape that harms its inhabitants, proposing it as one way of understanding how addiction is related to place. I draw on research in health geography, medical anthropology, and critical psychology to develop a novel theorization of the relationship between place, trauma, and addiction. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork with drug users exiting the prison system in Chicago, Illinois, the article considers the life histories of two men whose addictions to drugs and alcohol are profoundly related to place. Through close readings of these cases, I develop two readings of addiction-in-place, one in which addiction is the result of environmental stresses that produce a need to use drugs as a form of self-medication, and another in which the landscape acts as a container for histories of trauma and produces an addiction resembling a psychoanalytic symptom, expressed in self-destructive acts. Finally, through my use of the case history method, I contribute to methodological debates about how to research experiences of place and health, arguing that close attention to lived experience is necessary to draw links between macro-level arguments about the stresses produced by structural violence and the subjective experience of trauma that lies at the heart of addiction.

Citation

Proudfoot, J. (2019). Traumatic landscapes: Two geographies of addiction. Social Science & Medicine, 228, 194-201. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2019.03.020

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Mar 11, 2019
Online Publication Date Mar 15, 2019
Publication Date Apr 30, 2019
Deposit Date Mar 15, 2019
Publicly Available Date Mar 15, 2020
Journal Social science and medicine
Print ISSN 0277-9536
Electronic ISSN 0277-9536
Publisher Elsevier
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 228
Pages 194-201
DOI https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2019.03.020
Public URL https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1335481

Files





You might also like



Downloadable Citations