Competing Constructivisms: The Negotiation of PTSD and Related Stigma Among Post-9/11 Veterans in New York City.

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) stands as a form of psychopathology that straddles moral and psychiatric domains. Grounded in discrete instances of trauma, PTSD represents an etiological outlier in an era of increased attention to the genetics of mental illness and a prime location for social constructivist analyses of mental illness. This examination of PTSD narratives-as voiced in qualitative interviews and focus groups with 50 veterans of the recent Iraq and Afghanistan wars living in New York City-attends to the processes through which veterans conceive and navigate PTSD symptoms and diagnoses.

Contingencies of the will: Uses of harm reduction and the disease model of addiction among health care practitioners.

The concept of addiction as a disease is becoming firmly established in medical knowledge and practice at the same time as the logics of the harm reduction approach are gaining broader acceptance. How health care practitioners understand and intervene upon drug use among their patients is complicated by these two models. While harm reduction can be understood as a form of governmentality wherein drug-taking individuals express their regulated autonomy through self-governance, the notion of addiction as a disease removes the option of self-governance through negating the will of the individual.

Remaking hospital space: the health care practices of injection drug users in New York City.

Background: Medical care has long been depicted by social scientists as a field of social control, as well as a branch of Foucauldian disciplinary power. This report focuses attention on the hospital, a highly regulated place in the United States, and examines how injection drug users (IDUs) negotiate the medical social control and institutionalised disciplinary power they encounter in this place.

Methods: Twenty-eight qualitative interviews were conducted in New York City with low-income people who inject drugs on a regular basis.