The Evidence-to-Impact Podcast · The Social Science Research Institute

Episode 24: The Opioid Crisis: Destigmatization and Recovery

·27 min·1 clip

Sarah says opioid use disorder was treated for years like a 28-day detox problem, not a chronic illness.

Recovery is treated as shared work. Michael Donovan opens with the opioid crisis, then asks Denise Holden and Sarah Kawasaki to explain what they do before the conversation moves into care systems. Denise speaks from long-term recovery. She introduces herself as CEO of the RAISE Project, but also as a woman who has worked in substance use disorder since 1984. That order matters. She puts lived experience right beside organizational leadership, which fits the episode's focus on dignity, fear, and support that does not talk down to people. Kawasaki brings the medical side. As an internist and addiction medicine specialist at Penn State Health, she talks about learning to notice how patients with substance use disorder have been treated badly in care settings. The fear is not vague. She says many people have been made to feel addiction is their fault, and those experiences travel through communities. Fear has to be taken seriously before trust can come back. In this conversation, addiction medicine means validating that fear, naming where it came from, and helping repair harm left by earlier care. Donovan keeps the frame wider than medicine alone. He brings in people in recovery and law enforcement as part of the broader system around recovery. Co-occurring disorders become the clearest example. Kawasaki remembers being taught that mental illness could not be diagnosed while someone was actively using substances, and she treats that as part of the training clinicians inherited. The episode stays grounded. Stigma is not floated as a buzzword; it shows up in clinical judgment, lived experience, and the lines between sectors. Denise closes in a grateful, personal register. Donovan ends by noting the passion both guests bring and the need to bring common humanity back into view.

As heard by us

A steady, practical look at stigma, recovery, and the systems that shape both.

The episode treats the opioid crisis as a public health problem without losing sight of the people living through it. It gives the strongest attention to stigma, medical mistrust, and the slow work of rebuilding trust after care has failed people.

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Why you'd press play

Hear how opioid stigma, recovery, and medicine meet in one careful conversation.

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