The United States hit a record 93,000 opioid deaths in 2020, as a long-standing public health crisis collided with the isolation and multi-faceted stressors of the pandemic. In a recent opinion piece for The Boston Globe, Dr. Kevin Hill wrote about the dangers of leaving people to fight their addiction — and its associated stigmas — alone.
Hill, who is the director of the division of addiction psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, joined Jim Braude on Greater Boston to discuss, along with Dr. Ian Halim, a psychiatry resident at Beth Israel.
Both Hill and Halim said that stigma around addiction and mental health is still a problem in treating people with opioid abuse disorders.
“It’s so much easier for people to talk about, really, any other kind of medical problem other than addiction, particularly the opioid issue,” Hill said.
Watch: The Pandemic’s Overdose Toll
