“Overdose Has Many Faces”: The Politics of Care in Responding to Overdose at Sydney’s Medically Supervised Injecting Centre

Original research
by
Dertadian, George C. & Kenneth Yates

Release Date

2022

Geography

Australia

Language of Resource

English

Full Text Available

Yes

Open Access / OK to Reproduce

No

Peer Reviewed

Yes

Objective

In order to expand the field’s understanding of care beyond an avowed a-political approach to clinical supervision, we conducted qualitative interviews with staff at Sydney Medically Supervised Injecting Centre (MSIC) about how they respond to overdose.

Findings/Key points

Drawing on feminist notions of the politics of care we argue that overdoses are ontologically multiple phenomena, which are enacted at MSIC in ways that are explicitly differentiated from how they are understood and responded to in more traditional clinical settings. This illustrates how a desirable clinical intervention (saving lives) is made possible at MSIC through a set of constitutive relations (and politics) of care that are aimed at more than simply ensuring the client’s heart keeps beating.

Design/methods

Interviews

Keywords

Overdose
SCS/OPS