H Hansen
Biographic Data
| ID | 8956 |
|---|---|
| NAME | H Hansen |
| GIVEN NAMES | H |
| FAMILY NAME | Hansen |
| SIGNATURE | HANSEN H |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0569-1392 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 653 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1978 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Knowing equity, doing equity: Healthcare cultures and why reforms stall in everyday care
Health systems have multiplied equity-oriented frameworks over recent decades, yet inequities remain embedded in routine care. We argue that this persistent gap reflects a structural blind spot: culture is typically treated as an external attribute of patients or communities rather than as a constitutive dimension of healthcare itself. Reframing healthcare as culturally organised reveals how classification, knowledge validation, and criteria of e…
Confident Futures: Making Connections
Decreasing Stigma Toward People Who Inject Drugs: Harm Reduction Training for First-Year Medical Students
Practical Steps to Advance Health Equity in Research from the Ucla Covid-19 Health Equity Research and Advisory Committee
Introduction: The University of California, Los Angeles COVID-19 Health Equity Research and Advisory Committee was created to identify and fund research to address COVID-19 inequities. Methods: The committee addressed barriers to health equity research and funded $1.5 million of research. Results: These actions facilitated dialogue, shifted research infrastructure, and piloted strategies to enhance health equity impacts through consultation and f…
Global translation and adaptation of social medicines and structural competencies
This commentary on the special issue of Global Public Health on structural competency in global perspective asks: what is specific to the U.S. about structural competency, and what is its utility beyond the U.S., especially in the 'global south'? Why are biomedical practitioners the focus of U.S. structural competency? And what can U.S. structural competency advocates learn from the deep and rich social medicine traditions of Latin America? And i…
Unleashing Youth Creativity in Times of Covid: Reflections from a Collaborative Research Project
Rethinking urban-rural designations in public health surveillance of the overdose crisis and crafting an agenda for future monitoring
Rurality has served as a key concept in popular and scientific understandings of the US overdose crisis, with White, rural, and low-income areas thought to be most heavily affected. However, we observe that overdose trends have risen nearly uniformly across the urban-rural designations employed in most research, implying that their importance has likely been overstated or incorrectly conceptualized. Nevertheless, urbanicity/rurality does serve as…
Rethinking Psychiatry: Solutions for a Sociogenic Crisis
This essay draws on Frantz Fanon's insights about the sociogenesis of psychiatric disorders, and on the insights of feminist standpoint theory, to sketch a map toward sociogenic mental health. We argue that psychiatry should move away from iatrogenesis (the harms of our current individual-level and pathologizing approach) toward sociogenesis of mental health through robust collaboration with social movements of oppressed people, and their collect…
Evaluation of Increases in Drug Overdose Mortality Rates in the US by Race and Ethnicity Before and During the Covid-19 Pandemic
This cross-sectional study evaluates trends in increased drug overdose mortality rates in the US by race and ethnicity before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.
How opioids became “safe”: Pharmaceutical splitting and the racial politics of opioid safety
Substance use policy and practice in the Covid-19 pandemic: Learning from early pandemic responses through internationally comparative field data
The COVID-19 pandemic has created an unprecedented natural experiment in drug policy, treatment delivery, and harm reduction strategies by exposing wide variation in public health infrastructures and social safety nets around the world. Using qualitative data including ethnographic methods, questionnaires, and semi-structured interviews with people who use drugs (PWUD) and Delphi-method with experts from field sites spanning 13 different countrie…
Lessons for the Opioid Crisis—Integrating Social Determinants of Health Into Clinical Care
The Harms of Constructing Addiction as a Chronic, Relapsing Brain Disease
As an international network of historians and social scientists who study approaches to the management of drugs across time and place, we have noticed the effort to redefine addiction as a chronic, relapsing brain disease (CRBD). The CRBD model is promoted as a route to destigmatize addiction and to empower individuals to access treatment that works within that model’s terms.1 CRBD usefully recognizes that brain-based neural adaptations place ind…
Far From a “White Problem”: Responding to the Overdose Crisis as a Racial Justice Issue
Drug Overdose Epidemic Colliding With Covid-19: What the United States Can Learn From France
Confident futures: Community-based organizations as first responders and agents of change in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic
A Global Survey on Changes in the Supply, Price, and Use of Illicit Drugs and Alcohol, and Related Complications During the 2020 Covid-19 Pandemic
Background and Aims: COVID-19 has infected more than 77 million people worldwide and impacted the lives of many more, with a particularly devastating impact on vulnerable populations, including people with substance use disorders (SUDs). Quarantines, travel bans, regulatory changes, social distancing, and "lockdown" measures have affected drug and alcohol supply chains and subsequently their availability, price, and use patterns, with possible do…
Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare Vol. 47 No. 1
Welfare participation has been a longstanding issue of public debate for 50 years but remains largely understudied in welfare literature.The purpose of this research is to challenge the flawed assumptions of welfare participation by examining the varying spatial inequalities that influence U.S. welfare participation rates among eligible poor.This comparative analysis uses spatial inequality theory to examine welfareto-work participation rates in …
Race as a Ghost Variable in (White) Opioid Research
This paper traces the unspoken, implicit white racial logic of the brain disease model of addiction, which is based on seemingly universal, disembodied brains devoid of social or environmental influences. In the United States, this implicit white logic led to “context-free” neuroscience that made the social hierarchies of addiction and its consequences invisible to, and thus exacerbated by, national policies on opioids. The brain disease model of…
Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare Vol. 46 No. 4
Beyond the Cultural Competence Paradigm and contradictory tensions stemming from the multiple identities that constitute each person and community.It also demonstrated the ways in which structural conditions such as chronic poverty, language barriers, and vulnerability to immigration control are tied to gender, race, and class, categories that would later expand across other identities as the concept of intersectionality rapidly diffused across m…
Re-racialization of Addiction and the Redistribution of Blame in the White Opioid Epidemic
New York City has the largest number of opioid dependent people of U.S. cities, and within New York, Whites have the highest rate of prescription opioid and heroin overdose deaths. The rise of opioid abuse among Whites has resulted in popular narratives of victimization by prescribers, framing of addiction as a biological disease, and the promise of pharmaceutical treatments that differ from the criminalizing narratives that have historically des…
Substance-Induced Psychosis: Clinical-Racial Subjectivities and Capital in Diagnostic Apartheid
This article examines the ways in which psychiatrists differentially deploy schizophrenia and addiction diagnoses among white, privately insured patients in comparison with black and Latino patients in a public psychiatric unit. Drawing on critical race theory and the anthropology of moral agency, the article tracks the ways in which the overlapping and competing diagnostic frames of schizophrenia and addiction are structured by, and structure, t…
White opioids: Pharmaceutical race and the war on drugs that wasn’t
Assisted Technologies of Social Reproduction: Pharmaceutical Prosthesis for Gender, Race, and Class in the White Opioid “Crisis”
This article examines the symbolic work of gender as it intersects with race and class in popular media and in local community discourses surrounding the “suburban opioid epidemic,” in which national drug policies, and White futures, are thought to be at stake. The study starts with an analysis of the White, middle-class, female “new face of addiction” that has been cultivated by national press coverage of prescription opioid-cum-heroin overdoses…
Is the Prescription Opioid Epidemic a White Problem
AffiliationsHelena Hansen is with the departments of Anthropology and Psychiatry, New York University, New York, NY, and the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, Orangeburg, NY. Julie Netherland is with the Office of Academic Engagement, Drug Policy Alliance, New York
Structural competency: Theorizing a new medical engagement with stigma and inequality
This paper describes a shift in medical education away from pedagogic approaches to stigma and inequalities that emphasize cross-cultural understandings of individual patients, toward attention to forces that influence health outcomes at levels above individual interactions. It reviews existing structural approaches to stigma and health inequalities developed outside of medicine, and proposes changes to U.S. medical education that will infuse cli…
Pathologizing poverty: New forms of diagnosis, disability, and structural stigma under welfare reform
The War on Drugs That Wasn’t: Wasted Whiteness, “Dirty Doctors,” and Race in Media Coverage of Prescription Opioid Misuse
Is the Prescription Opioid Epidemic a White Problem
AffiliationsHelena Hansen is with the departments of Anthropology and Psychiatry, New York University, New York, NY, and the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, Orangeburg, NY. Julie Netherland is with the Office of Academic Engagement, Drug Policy Alliance, New York
Re-racialization of Addiction and the Redistribution of Blame in the White Opioid Epidemic
New York City has the largest number of opioid dependent people of U.S. cities, and within New York, Whites have the highest rate of prescription opioid and heroin overdose deaths. The rise of opioid abuse among Whites has resulted in popular narratives of victimization by prescribers, framing of addiction as a biological disease, and the promise of pharmaceutical treatments that differ from the criminalizing narratives that have historically des…
"The "new masculinity: Addiction treatment as a reconstruction of gender in Puerto Rican evangelist street ministries
Assisted Technologies of Social Reproduction: Pharmaceutical Prosthesis for Gender, Race, and Class in the White Opioid “Crisis”
This article examines the symbolic work of gender as it intersects with race and class in popular media and in local community discourses surrounding the “suburban opioid epidemic,” in which national drug policies, and White futures, are thought to be at stake. The study starts with an analysis of the White, middle-class, female “new face of addiction” that has been cultivated by national press coverage of prescription opioid-cum-heroin overdoses…
Ethnography of Health for Social Change: Impact on public perception and policy
From White Bullets to Black Markets and Greened Medicine: The Neuroeconomics and Neuroracial Politics of Opioid Pharmaceuticals
Synthetic opiates (opioids) have created among the most profitable markets worldwide. Two decades ago, FDA approval of Oxycontin(R) as a "minimally addictive" opioid pain reliever fueled an unprecedented rise in prescription opioid abuse. This was followed by a little known act of U.S. Congress enabling general physicians to use an opioid maintenance medication, buprenorphine, for addiction treatment in their private practices, leading to enormou…
Confident futures: Community-based organizations as first responders and agents of change in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic
The economy of risk and respect: Accounts by Puerto Rican sex workers of HIV risk taking
Three-hundred-eleven female drug-using sex workers in urban Puerto Rico were asked to describe their last negotiation with a client. They described efforts to protect themselves from many hazards of sex work, including violence, illness, and drug withdrawal. They also described efforts to minimize the stigma and marginalization of sex work by cultivating relationships with clients, distinguishing between types of clients, and prioritizing their r…
From quarantine to condoms: Shifting policies and problems of HIV control in Cuba
This study reviews HIV prevention in Cuba in light of (1) the liberalization of HIV quarantine, (2) the growth in tourism, and (3) the aggressive system of public health promotion. Sixty-two key informants, including Cubans who are HIV-positive, at risk, or working as health professionals, were interviewed during June and July of 1996. Findings include: (1) there is a common public perception that the government's national HIV screening and conta…
Substance-Induced Psychosis: Clinical-Racial Subjectivities and Capital in Diagnostic Apartheid
This article examines the ways in which psychiatrists differentially deploy schizophrenia and addiction diagnoses among white, privately insured patients in comparison with black and Latino patients in a public psychiatric unit. Drawing on critical race theory and the anthropology of moral agency, the article tracks the ways in which the overlapping and competing diagnostic frames of schizophrenia and addiction are structured by, and structure, t…
The Harms of Constructing Addiction as a Chronic, Relapsing Brain Disease
As an international network of historians and social scientists who study approaches to the management of drugs across time and place, we have noticed the effort to redefine addiction as a chronic, relapsing brain disease (CRBD). The CRBD model is promoted as a route to destigmatize addiction and to empower individuals to access treatment that works within that model’s terms.1 CRBD usefully recognizes that brain-based neural adaptations place ind…
Race as a Ghost Variable in (White) Opioid Research
This paper traces the unspoken, implicit white racial logic of the brain disease model of addiction, which is based on seemingly universal, disembodied brains devoid of social or environmental influences. In the United States, this implicit white logic led to “context-free” neuroscience that made the social hierarchies of addiction and its consequences invisible to, and thus exacerbated by, national policies on opioids. The brain disease model of…
Shifting blame: Buprenorphine prescribers, addiction treatment, and prescription monitoring in middle-class America
Growing nonmedical prescription opioid analgesic use among suburban and rural Whites has changed the public's perception of the nature of opioid addiction, and of appropriate interventions. Opioid addiction has been recast as a biological disorder in which patients are victims of their neurotransmitters and opioid prescribers are irresponsible purveyors of dangerous substances requiring controls. This framing has led to a different set of policy …
Enhancing the public impact of ethnography
Rethinking Psychiatry: Solutions for a Sociogenic Crisis
This essay draws on Frantz Fanon's insights about the sociogenesis of psychiatric disorders, and on the insights of feminist standpoint theory, to sketch a map toward sociogenic mental health. We argue that psychiatry should move away from iatrogenesis (the harms of our current individual-level and pathologizing approach) toward sociogenesis of mental health through robust collaboration with social movements of oppressed people, and their collect…
Far From a “White Problem”: Responding to the Overdose Crisis as a Racial Justice Issue
The impact of parental consent on the HIV testing of minors
OBJECTIVES: This investigation assessed change in use of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) testing by minors after removal of the parental consent requirement in Connecticut. METHODS: HIV counseling and testing records for 13- to 17-year-olds who accessed publicly funded testing sites were analyzed. RESULTS: The number of visits increased by 44% from the 12-month period before the statutory change (n = 656) to the 12-month period thereafter (n =…
Misclassification of childhood homicide on death certificates
Suspect classification of homicide deaths of Connecticut residents under 20 years of age was noted for 29 percent of cases examined. Misclassification was attributed to incomplete or erroneous information recorded on the death certificates, rather than errors in the designation of ICD-9 homicide codes. The results have important implications in the interpretation of vital statistics when homicide is listed as the cause of death and underscore the…
Weighing the evidence: Risks and benefits of participatory documentary in corporatized clinics
Lessons for the Opioid Crisis—Integrating Social Determinants of Health Into Clinical Care
School achievement: Risk factor in teenage pregnancies
A review of live births, spontaneous fetal deaths, and induced abortions in residents of Upstate New York ages 12--17 shows that pregnancy rates increased during the period 1971 through 1974. This increase was attributable to pregnancies ending in induced abortion while live births remained relatively stable. White teenagers had a higher frequency of induced abortions than non-white teenagers, but induced abortions increased more rapidly among no…
Misclassification of childhood homicide on death certificates
Suspect classification of homicide deaths of Connecticut residents under 20 years of age was noted for 29 percent of cases examined. Misclassification was attributed to incomplete or erroneous information recorded on the death certificates, rather than errors in the designation of ICD-9 homicide codes. The results have important implications in the interpretation of vital statistics when homicide is listed as the cause of death and underscore the…
The impact of parental consent on the HIV testing of minors
OBJECTIVES: This investigation assessed change in use of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) testing by minors after removal of the parental consent requirement in Connecticut. METHODS: HIV counseling and testing records for 13- to 17-year-olds who accessed publicly funded testing sites were analyzed. RESULTS: The number of visits increased by 44% from the 12-month period before the statutory change (n = 656) to the 12-month period thereafter (n =…
From quarantine to condoms: Shifting policies and problems of HIV control in Cuba
This study reviews HIV prevention in Cuba in light of (1) the liberalization of HIV quarantine, (2) the growth in tourism, and (3) the aggressive system of public health promotion. Sixty-two key informants, including Cubans who are HIV-positive, at risk, or working as health professionals, were interviewed during June and July of 1996. Findings include: (1) there is a common public perception that the government's national HIV screening and conta…
The economy of risk and respect: Accounts by Puerto Rican sex workers of HIV risk taking
Three-hundred-eleven female drug-using sex workers in urban Puerto Rico were asked to describe their last negotiation with a client. They described efforts to protect themselves from many hazards of sex work, including violence, illness, and drug withdrawal. They also described efforts to minimize the stigma and marginalization of sex work by cultivating relationships with clients, distinguishing between types of clients, and prioritizing their r…
Isla Evangelista—A Story of Church and State: Puerto Rico’s Faith-Based Initiatives in Drug Treatment
"The "new masculinity: Addiction treatment as a reconstruction of gender in Puerto Rican evangelist street ministries
From White Bullets to Black Markets and Greened Medicine: The Neuroeconomics and Neuroracial Politics of Opioid Pharmaceuticals
Synthetic opiates (opioids) have created among the most profitable markets worldwide. Two decades ago, FDA approval of Oxycontin(R) as a "minimally addictive" opioid pain reliever fueled an unprecedented rise in prescription opioid abuse. This was followed by a little known act of U.S. Congress enabling general physicians to use an opioid maintenance medication, buprenorphine, for addiction treatment in their private practices, leading to enormou…
Enhancing the public impact of ethnography
Ethnography of Health for Social Change: Impact on public perception and policy
Weighing the evidence: Risks and benefits of participatory documentary in corporatized clinics
Effects of Regulation on Methadone and Buprenorphine Provision in the Wake of Hurricane Sandy
Structural competency: Theorizing a new medical engagement with stigma and inequality
This paper describes a shift in medical education away from pedagogic approaches to stigma and inequalities that emphasize cross-cultural understandings of individual patients, toward attention to forces that influence health outcomes at levels above individual interactions. It reviews existing structural approaches to stigma and health inequalities developed outside of medicine, and proposes changes to U.S. medical education that will infuse cli…
Pathologizing poverty: New forms of diagnosis, disability, and structural stigma under welfare reform
HIV/Aids in Puerto Rican People Who Inject Drugs: Policy Considerations
We commend the important work of Deren et al. that underscores the high rates of HIV among Puerto Rican people who inject drugs (PRPWID) and highlights the health, social, and service disparities between Puerto Rico and the Northeast US region. As articulated in their article, HIV/AIDS risk and substance use are not individual problems with individual consequences—the epidemic impacts community and culture, across borders and boundaries. In addit…
Is the Prescription Opioid Epidemic a White Problem
AffiliationsHelena Hansen is with the departments of Anthropology and Psychiatry, New York University, New York, NY, and the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, Orangeburg, NY. Julie Netherland is with the Office of Academic Engagement, Drug Policy Alliance, New York
The War on Drugs That Wasn’t: Wasted Whiteness, “Dirty Doctors,” and Race in Media Coverage of Prescription Opioid Misuse
Shifting blame: Buprenorphine prescribers, addiction treatment, and prescription monitoring in middle-class America
Growing nonmedical prescription opioid analgesic use among suburban and rural Whites has changed the public's perception of the nature of opioid addiction, and of appropriate interventions. Opioid addiction has been recast as a biological disorder in which patients are victims of their neurotransmitters and opioid prescribers are irresponsible purveyors of dangerous substances requiring controls. This framing has led to a different set of policy …
White opioids: Pharmaceutical race and the war on drugs that wasn’t
Assisted Technologies of Social Reproduction: Pharmaceutical Prosthesis for Gender, Race, and Class in the White Opioid “Crisis”
This article examines the symbolic work of gender as it intersects with race and class in popular media and in local community discourses surrounding the “suburban opioid epidemic,” in which national drug policies, and White futures, are thought to be at stake. The study starts with an analysis of the White, middle-class, female “new face of addiction” that has been cultivated by national press coverage of prescription opioid-cum-heroin overdoses…
Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare Vol. 46 No. 4
Beyond the Cultural Competence Paradigm and contradictory tensions stemming from the multiple identities that constitute each person and community.It also demonstrated the ways in which structural conditions such as chronic poverty, language barriers, and vulnerability to immigration control are tied to gender, race, and class, categories that would later expand across other identities as the concept of intersectionality rapidly diffused across m…
Re-racialization of Addiction and the Redistribution of Blame in the White Opioid Epidemic
New York City has the largest number of opioid dependent people of U.S. cities, and within New York, Whites have the highest rate of prescription opioid and heroin overdose deaths. The rise of opioid abuse among Whites has resulted in popular narratives of victimization by prescribers, framing of addiction as a biological disease, and the promise of pharmaceutical treatments that differ from the criminalizing narratives that have historically des…
Substance-Induced Psychosis: Clinical-Racial Subjectivities and Capital in Diagnostic Apartheid
This article examines the ways in which psychiatrists differentially deploy schizophrenia and addiction diagnoses among white, privately insured patients in comparison with black and Latino patients in a public psychiatric unit. Drawing on critical race theory and the anthropology of moral agency, the article tracks the ways in which the overlapping and competing diagnostic frames of schizophrenia and addiction are structured by, and structure, t…
Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare Vol. 47 No. 1
Welfare participation has been a longstanding issue of public debate for 50 years but remains largely understudied in welfare literature.The purpose of this research is to challenge the flawed assumptions of welfare participation by examining the varying spatial inequalities that influence U.S. welfare participation rates among eligible poor.This comparative analysis uses spatial inequality theory to examine welfareto-work participation rates in …
Race as a Ghost Variable in (White) Opioid Research
This paper traces the unspoken, implicit white racial logic of the brain disease model of addiction, which is based on seemingly universal, disembodied brains devoid of social or environmental influences. In the United States, this implicit white logic led to “context-free” neuroscience that made the social hierarchies of addiction and its consequences invisible to, and thus exacerbated by, national policies on opioids. The brain disease model of…
Medicine (32 works) · Sociology (23 works) · Political science (21 works) · Psychiatry (20 works) · Opioid Use Disorder Treatment (17 works) · Psychology (16 works) · Law (15 works) · Addiction (10 works) · Criminology (10 works) · Nursing (10 works)