Session: Healing the Opioid Crisis with Mindfulness-Based Interventions: How Social Work Research Can Contribute to the NIH HEAL Initiative (Society for Social Work and Research 24th Annual Conference - Reducing Racial and Economic Inequality)

The opioid crisis is a significant threat to public health that is now being addressed with heightened urgency at both clinical and policy levels. For much of the 20th century, opioids were mainly prescribed for postoperative pain and palliative care, yet subsequent to the marketing of new opioids in the 1990s, the medical community began to more liberally prescribe opioids to treat a wide array of non-cancer pain conditions. Consequently, over the past 20 years, opioid prescriptions climbed to as high as 208 million by 2011. This dramatic increase in opioid prescriptions was paralleled by a rising incidence of opioid addiction that now affects 2 million Americans overall. Individuals suffering from opioid addiction are often highly vulnerable and confront a range of social inequalities, resulting in a pervasive sense of hopelessness that has led opioid addiction to be called a “disease of despair.”

In 2018, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) launched the HEAL (Helping to End Addiction Long-term) Initiative, a trans-agency effort to advance scientific solutions to stem the national opioid crisis. Among the treatment solutions being studied in the NIH HEAL initiative, mindfulness-based interventions have been identified by the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) as being potentially promising treatments for pain and opioid addiction. Social work scholars and practitioners have begun to pursue mindfulness-based interventions as a means of supporting individuals suffering from pain and opioid addiction. This symposium will present evidence of the therapeutic mechanisms and efficacy of mindfulness-based interventions for pain and opioid addiction. This presentation brings together the Deputy Director of NCCIH with senior experts and promising junior scholars in the field who will present data on the role of mindfulness-based interventions in treating pain and opioid addiction.

Garland will present results from a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of the effects of an eight-week Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE) on preventing opioid misuse risk and opioid dose escalation among chronic pain patients, with a focus on the cognitive, affective, and psychophysiological mechanisms underlying the treatment effect. Hanley will present results from a large RCT of the effects of a single brief session of mindfulness training, or hypnotic suggestion on pain and desire for opioids among patients undergoing orthopedic surgery. Washburn will present results from a study of a virtual reality-augmented mindfulness-based coping intervention for Latinx heroin users, with a focus on measures of physiological opioid cue-reactivity and self-reported craving. Cooperman will present ecological momentary assessment data from a RCT funded by the NIH HEAL initiative testing MORE as an adjunct to community-based methadone maintenance therapy in an inner city, low-income, predominately Black and Latinx sample. Lastly, NCCIH Deputy Director Shurtleff will serve as discussant by contextualizing these findings within the aims and scope of NIH HEAL initiative, and will discuss what role social work researchers and practitioners may play in developing a workforce to deliver mindfulness-based interventions to help halt the opioid crisis. This symposium will shed light on the promise, efficacy, and therapeutic mechanisms of mindfulness-based interventions for pain and opioid addiction.