The line of vulnerability in a recovery assemblage.

Abstract

From a developmental-psychological perspective, young people's recovery from drug misuse requires building up internal resilience and mobilising external resources to develop and maintain a shield of invulnerability. Vulnerability, in this context, is typically understood in terms of the material, social and/or affective conditions of drug use. These conditions are often targeted in prevention and intervention efforts, while also featuring in the emergence of recovery-oriented policy and treatment agendas internationally. In these ways, drug treatment programs implicitly impose vulnerability as a pre-condition to justify intervention and control, just as vulnerabilities are reproduced through the physical and social isolation that individuals experience in treatment. In this article we challenge normative understandings of recovery that regard vulnerability as an inherent condition of 'risk' and 'relapse' for those 'in recovery'. The article bridges interdisciplinary research to offer an analysis grounded in Deleuzian ideas for understanding vulnerability - an area for which his philosophy has been largely overlooked. As the case of recovery unravels, we analyse vulnerability in recovery as affirmative; as an ongoing transformative force of becoming-well.