Rejecting the medicated state: From medications to marijuana

• In Event: 21010 - Social Context, Family, and Crime

Abstract

Studies of poverty governance emphasize how state actors manage the lives of people in their purview using rehabilitative discourses, encompassing social rehabilitation (i.e., independence) and psychological rehabilitation (i.e., trauma recovery). This paper addresses how youth aging out elect to stop taking psychiatric medications upon turning the legal age of majority (18 years old), indicative of shifting conditions of governance, often after years of being required to take medications while in foster care. To make sense of youth’s discontinued use, I show that youth, as well as staff, draw on justifications which are infused with rehabilitative language central to child welfare. These justifications center on concerns regarding system control, potential dependence, and the inability of medications to resolve young people’s trauma histories. I then show how youth position their marijuana use in ways that can eschew such concerns – while staff, constrained by the broader legal context, emphasize their inability to alter youth’s behaviors in the process. I thus contend that youth remake rehabilitative logics to justify their disengagement from state interventions and instead engage in activities which can advance their practice of self-governance. In doing so, youth fulfill system goals regarding independence, albeit in illicit and potentially precarity-inducing ways.

Author

• Loren M Beard, Harvard University