Poole, Nancy

The chapter, "Diversifying health promotion" was written by the listed authors including Colleen Reid (Douglas College Faculty). In this innovative collection, leading thinkers in clinical medicine, sociology, epidemiology, kinesiology, education, and public policy reveal how health promotion is failing communities by failing women. Despite a longstanding consensus that social inequalities shape global patterns of illness and opportunities for health, mainstream health promotion frameworks continue to ignore gender at relational, household, community, and state levels. Exploring the ways in which gendered norms affect health and social equity for all human beings, Making It Better invites us to rethink conventional approaches to health promotion and to strive for transformative initiatives and policies. Offering practical tools and evidence-based strategies for moving from gender integration to gender transformation, this anthology is required reading for policymakers, health promotion and healthcare practitioners, researchers, community developers, and social service providers. -- From publisher description.

In this paper we examined discourses of mothers who use substances. Focus groups were conducted at two different treatment programmes with diverse women who identified as mothers challenged by substance use. Real scenarios were presented to the participants and feedback was sought about how the women within the scenarios managed their situations and the actions taken by legal, media, and health authorities. Through the use of three lenses—rights, risks, and evidence—we identified four major discourses in the participants' talk. The 'good mother', 'bad mother', 'thwarted mother' and 'addicted mother' discourses revealed the multiple and at times contradictory ways the women made sense of their lives. Within all of the discourses the mother-child bond and the importance of providing necessary supports to mothers with substance-use problems were central. The women's discourses highlighted the challenges of negotiating the prevailing attitudes, practices and stigmas of being a substance-using mother while trying to do the right thing for their children.