Study: No Single Term for Opioid Addiction Can Reduce All Forms of Stigma

Different medical and nonmedical terms for opioid addiction can reduce specific types of stigma, but no singular term can reduce all potential stigma biases, according to a study conducted by Recovery Research Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Findings from the study were published by the journal Addiction.

The national study included 3,500 participants, who were assigned one of six phrases that were included in otherwise-identical short paragraphs describing a person being treated for opioid-related impairment:

• Chronically relapsing brain disease
• Brain disease
• Disease
• Illness
• Disorder
• Problem

The participants were then asked to rate the extent to which they thought: the person was to blame for their opioid use, whether they could recover from it, how dangerous the person described was, and whether the person should be excluded from certain social settings.

“We found that while some terms were very good at reducing certain types of stigma, these same terms increased other types of stigma, and vice versa,” John F. Kelly, PhD, the study’s lead investigator, said in a news release.

For example, describing a person as having “a chronically relapsing brain disease” resulted in lower ratings of personal blame, but also low ratings with regards to whether participants thought the patient could recover. Meanwhile, nonmedical terms were linked with a higher rate of blame, but also a stronger belief that the patient could recover and shouldn’t be considered as dangerous.

The researchers concluded that efforts to reduce stigma through language should be tailored for their specific purpose.

“If you want to decrease stigmatizing blame, use of more medical terminology may be optimal; if you want to increase confidence that the person can recover and is not dangerous, use of non-medical terminology may be best,” Kelly said.