Learned to be a “Prodigal Son”: A narrative analysis on the appropriation of mediated drug discourse in drug rehabilitation

Drug addiction has usually been regarded as a disease and addicts are the “sufferer” of metabolic disease by pharmacological effects of drugs with the “symptoms” related to irrational thinking. Bailey (2005) suggests ‘addiction’ is also a moral concept since it is conceptualized as a failure of the self to exercise control over own body’s desires and functions. However, Davies (1997) argues the disease and moral conceptions of “addiction” is a social construct which is functional for the drug addicts, rehabilitation practitioners, government and public to escape from sophisticated problems of the volitional drug use.

A previous ethnographic study (Tsen, 2005) suggests a “Prodigal Son Returns Home” discourse is found prominent in Christianity drug rehabilitation. Textual analysis on local anti-drug advertisements and TV news documentaries (Tsen, 2016) also found the “Prodigal Son Returns Home” discourse, which encapsulates moral and medical discourses, is prominent in media representations of drug addicts in Hong Kong. However, the moral and disease conceptions may not applicable for youth psychotropic drug addicts with no severe withdrawal symptom.

To study how the mediated drug discourse is appropriated and its impacts, narrative inquiry is important to figure out ‘what’ and ‘how’ the recovery is conducted in drug rehabilitation (Anderson, 2015). In order to investigate the appropriation of the “Prodigal Son Returns Home” discourse in outpatient drug rehabilitation, in-depth interviews were conducted with eight youth drug addicts. Following Gergen’s (1994) model of narrative analysis, the data are studied in terms of valued end-point, ordering of relevant events, casual linkage between events, and stability of identity. Four types of drug narrative are identified: the “preferred go through narrative” features discursive components of Prodigal Son Returns Home discourse; the “habitual and consumption story” represents the hedonistic drug discourse; the “flexible prodigal son story” which the shift between hedonistic and abstinence identities; and the “ineffective prodigal son story” which shows the incapability of the "returned prodigal son" in explaining life experience. The result shows how the mediated drug discourse constitute to the dissonance between addicts, drug rehabilitation and preventive education.