Stabilisation, Professionalisation and the Good Life: Shared Aspirations Among Psychiatrists and Others in Northern India

In a series of interviews with former drug users, their family members, residents-in-training and psychiatrists in northern India, the notion of ‘stabilisation’ emerges as a critical point of convergence in personal aspirations, professional development and discourses of care both inside and outside the clinic. In this paper, I argue that affective attachments to stabilisation, understood as the mitigation or resolution of crisis, are critical for understanding many aspects of contemporary psychiatric practice in India at the intersection of bureaucracy, scientific research and clinical care, including the systemic effects of hyper-specialisation in the field of Indian medical education, which constrains individuals to both conform and perform. Shared aspirations towards stability among patients and their doctors also mark the conservative pragmatism of ‘de-addiction’ as risk-averse ideology animated and shared by the various stakeholders involved in the afterlives of drug use.