“Living in the shadow of treatment”: Drug rehabilitation and life-course experiences of ethnic minority youth in Southwest China

Background China’s drug rehabilitation system has begun to receive increasing research attention. This emerging research tends to treat institutional treatment, community rehabilitation, and post-treatment experiences as separate stages. However, the experiences of ethnic minority young people in this system remain under-researched. This study examines how ethnic minority youth in Southwest China experience compulsory isolation and community-based drug rehabilitation across the life course, with particular attention to what participants described as the enduring “shadows” of treatment. Methods Drawing on a multi-site ethnographic study, which includes in-depth interviews with 17 ethnic minority youth who had experienced compulsory isolation rehabilitation and community-based rehabilitation, the study combines thematic coding with a life-course analysis. This approach enables us to trace how treatment is narrated across periods before, during and after formal institutional intervention. Results The findings show that treatment casts a shadow across three connected temporal moments. Before entering treatment, participants described it through peers’ stories, “luck-seeking” optimism and distrust toward rehabilitation institutions. During treatment, compulsory isolation and community-based rehabilitation were experienced as forceful interventions that reorganised everyday life through confinement, discipline, moral correction and surveillance. After treatment, rehabilitation histories continued to shape employment opportunities, intimate relationships, family life and community belonging, while some participants sought alternative forms of healing through local ritual and Buddhist practices. Conclusion The findings show how stigma and claims to care extended the rehabilitation system beyond the formal period of treatment, remaining embedded in participants’ social relationships and life trajectories. By foregrounding the experiences of young people in a part of the world (China) that is not often discussed in the drugs field, and among a group even less often considered (ethnic minority youth in Southwestern China), the paper deepens the field’s understanding of how rehabilitation and treatment can become part of the harm it claims to address.