[Novel psychoactive substance users' highly valenced life story episodes: A content analysis]

Novel psychoactive substance use (NPS) has proven a challenge for the domestic addiction treatment system. In the first few years, studies focused on types of substances and prevalence. Recently social and cultu ral background, personality/identity issues and experiences of NPS users have been thematised in scientific studies. Our study is connected to the latter tradition.

Our study comprised a questionnaire on sociodemographic factors, and a mixed method content analysis of highly valenced episodes of life interviews, combining qualitative and quantitative approaches. We analysed the data obtained from 42 NPS users entering treatment. NPS use was confirmed by preceding drug tests. We used descriptive statistical methods to analyse questionnaire data, and employed paired-sample T-test to analyse the data from quanti tative content analysis. The text corpus (personal texts) of the Hungarian National Text Resources was selected as baseline to compare percentages. In our qualitative analysis, we outlined a conceptual network on high point and low point episodes of the life story.

Extreme poverty and deprivation was not characteristic of the current sample as a whole. Our content ana - lysis supported previous results on the highly self-destructive nature of novel psychoactive substance use. Major results of the content analysis of highly valenced low point texts were experiences of entrapment, failure, victimisation and never-ending troubles. The use of function words, especially in low point texts, bore marked resemblance with "negative code" frequencies, also indicating a self-destructive attitude. Parallel, elements related to inevitability have increased significantly, while words referring to defence (generalizations and distancing) decreased.

We interpret the results in terms of the arrested flight/cry of pain model. The results support and add to the conclusions of previous studies on the highly self-destructive nature of NPS-use and may introduce new aspects into treatment. The study is persuasive on the relevance of content analysis in clinical areas.