ADDICTION > recovery: The Surprising Spiritual Solution to Masculinity and Deindustrialization Happening in a Men’s Addiction Treatment Centre
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recovery from addiction is often viewed as the achievement of abstinence as well as the reclamation of the things lost to addiction: agency, health, productivity, spiritual wellness. This study, based on fieldwork at a Twelve Step-oriented men’s treatment centre in Vancouver, recasts addiction and recovery as a problem and solution on opposing sides of an unbalanced equation, where the problem is greater than the solution: ADDICTION > recovery. With the solution retroactively oriented to the individual’s unwellness, the social conditions that continue to produce addiction remain. It is argued that the treatment centre in this study is “treating” three intersecting “crises,” not just one: the drug and addiction crisis, the “masculinity” crisis, and deindustrialization. As such, attention is given to the conditions affecting the overrepresented treatment residents encountered in this study, known to be dying in the toxic drug “epidemic” at rates disproportionate to other groups (Perrin 2020): working class white men. These conditions include: unemployment, abandoned communities, loss of social status and security, and masculine norms that valourize risk, invulnerability, and “working hard and playing harder.” Additionally, this imbalance potentiates the exploitation of those who work and volunteer in the treatment industry, many of whom are “recovering addicts” deeply concerned with saving their “brothers.” Still, while the recovery solution is misaligned with these problems, the spiritual, disciplinary treatment process – which encourages men to depend on God, to open up, to ask for help, and to be “of service” – does offer men in treatment a kind of moral reskilling that can mitigate the risk of working class white men turning to the dangerous politics of aggrievement, and can help orient them to the “soft skills” of the “service economy.” The recovering men who end up working in treatment can be seen as the once “hyper masculine” becoming effective workers in the historically feminized realm of carework. As such, a man who starts out injured by deindustrialization and then comes to work as a recovery/care worker is a living embodiment of the transformation of labour, of heavy labour being reborn as service work.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".