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How We Hurt explores the origins and evolution of the ongoing opioid overdose epidemic in North America, focusing specifically on how a shifting politics of pain paved the way for the current crisis. Using archival and qualitative research, Melina Sherman traces the history of pain and reveals how the opioid crisis has evolved alongside new conceptions of addiction that condition whose pain is seen as legitimate and whose is not.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
- Acknowledgements
- Opening
- Chapter 1: Tracing the Painkiller Revolution
- Chapter 2: Strategic Ignorance in Opioid Regulation
- Chapter 3: Branding Pain Relief
- Chapter 4: Self-Help and the Rise of the Pain Patient-Expert
- Chapter 5: Pain's New Faces
- Closing
- References
- Index
Über den Autor / die Autorin
Melina Sherman is a communication scholar and lead health researcher at Knology in New York City. Her research interests center on the relationship between health, culture, and media. Her work has appeared in a number of communication and social science journals, including Public Culture, Communication, Culture & Critique, and the International Journal of Communication.
Zusammenfassung
How We Hurt dives into the institutional and cultural dimensions of the ongoing opioid epidemic. In a detailed analysis of pain management, opioid regulation, pharmaceutical branding, self-help, and public discourses on opioid addiction, Melina Sherman argues that the linchpin underlying the opioid epidemic's evolution in North America is the problem of pain. By unpacking the politics of pain in different domains, How We Hurt shows how the crisis emerged and shifted, and why it looks the way it does today. The book's chapters begin by tracing the trajectory of opioids in pain management, where decisions regarding the measurement of pain led to relief becoming wedded to opioids in medicine. The following chapters examine the problem of pain in opioid regulation, pharmaceutical branding, and the self-help industry. In these areas, a disastrous combination of strategic ignorance and deep-seated ties between public health entities and pharmaceutical companies drove the influx of opioids onto the market and into our medicine cabinets. The book's penultimate chapter applies the analysis of pain to the problem of opioid addiction in popular discourse and shows how the opioid crisis has evolved alongside new conceptions of addiction and people who use opioids that condition whose pain is seen as legitimate and whose is not. Finally, the book concludes by considering the implications of its findings for the development of drug policy and future research on public health disasters, insisting on an interdisciplinary and multi-faceted approach to the study of pain and its place American culture.
Zusatztext
Sherman's book is incredibly timely, important, and absolutely unique. She offers readers an often overlooked history of the opioid crisis, and makes crucial connections between the regulation of pharmaceutical drugs, the moral and social panics around the opioid "epidemic" the branding of painkillers as a "right to be free from pain," and the histories of physicians and medications, giving us in the process a beautifully written and urgent framework for critically analyzing the different dimensions of drug use, and over-use, in US society. Her important critique of the structures of constraint, control and exclusion that characterize what we now call the opioid epidemic is essential reading for not only academics but also the public at large. An absolute must-read!"
Sarah Banet-Weiser, Professor, Annenberg School for Communication
