Lors de la prochaine séance du Philosophy of Psychiatry Webinar, Daniel Buchman (Dalla Lana School of Public Health) offrira en anglais une présentation intitulée « Chronic Pain as a Disease of the Brain and the Implications for Stigma ».

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Résumé:

Chronic pain is an individual and subjective condition that is often refractory to objective assessment. Chronic pain is also highly stigmatized, creating barriers in access to care and causing those who live in pain to be subjected to epistemic injustices. Advances in the neuroscience of chronic pain have encouraged advocates to argue that chronic pain should be considered a disease in itself, and not merely a symptom of some other condition, to legitimize the experience of chronic pain and reduce stigma. In many ways, these are similar arguments that were advanced in favour of considering addiction and mental illness as brain diseases. However, as the history of and evidence from brain disease models of addiction and mental illness suggest, brain disease models may inadvertently increase some aspects of stigma, such as fear and prognostic pessimism, while reducing others, such as blame and personal responsibility. In this presentation, I discuss the parallels between brain disease models of addiction and mental illness and the emerging idea of chronic pain as a disease and a disease of the brain specifically. I draw upon multidisciplinary scholarship from philosophy, bioethics, sociology, psychology, and social science research, and explore how stigma is enmeshed with concepts of identity, agency, technology, evidence, and objectivity. I argue that the ethics lessons from brain disease models of addiction and mental illness offer a cautionary tale for chronic pain with respect to stigma.