Connor Beaton talks with a speaker about why men die from accidental opioid poisonings at higher rates. The explanation centers on the "three I's": injury from life events like breakups, interiority or turning inward to self-medicate, and isolation that deepens substance use.
You dug into accidental and unintentional deaths as the third leading cause of male deaths, which was kind of surprising. One of the things that stood out was accidental opioid deaths and accidental opioid related poisoning hospitalizations involved men. Do you have a sense of what maybe culturally or within us as men drives us towards those types of addictive patterns and behaviors or anything that you want to just sort of comment on that?
So we often talk about this notion of the three eyes like injury, interiority and isolation. And so I think for a lot of guys when they get an injury and it might be something like a relationship breakup, their parents divorcing or accumulation of issues, they tend to look interiorly, they look for the remedy and the most often go to for a little bit of respite within that is substances. So we talk about guys self medicating a lot and then isolating in the problem and isolating in said remedy which is around the self medication.
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