Self-Help and the Rise of the Pain Patient-Expert

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 4 examines the ways in which the discourses that mark the pharmaceutical branding of opioids have become integrated into and reworked in the nonpharmaceutical self-help industry, which many people in pain often turn to when attempting to stop using opioids. This chapter traces self-help’s entrance into pain management through theories and programs of chronic pain “self-management.” It discusses how the rise of self-help in the domain of chronic pain has also paralleled the creation of a new kind of pain patient—the pain patient-expert. In both the pharmaceutical industry and the self-help industry, pain is constructed as the antithesis to leading a good life, which itself is cast in terms of individual productivity and the ability to restore and then enhance one’s own capacities. Such a discourse is fundamentally incompatible with the reality that pain is a deeply social phenomenon—with socially informed causes and, potentially, solutions.