About

The Social Pain Institute is a nonprofit working to translate the science of social pain into research, clinical access, and policy change.

SPI is organized as a Colorado nonprofit corporation and runs on a small, founder-led basis while it builds its research and advisory network. Our credibility rests on having no financial stake in any medication or manufacturer, and on being honest about the state of the evidence — naming clearly what is established, what is promising, and what is still unproven.

Founder

Jesse Haigh (they/them) is a patient advocate, software engineer, and independent researcher with deep familiarity with the social-pain and endogenous-opioid-system literature. Jesse founded SPI to turn lived experience and a scattered research base into something a clinician or scientist could act on — including the citation-audited prescriber guide at bpd.fyi.

A personal note

I came to this through my own family. Addiction — opioid and alcohol — runs through one side of it. I can see now that we’re autistic, but most of my family was never in a position to have that, or anything underneath it, named. Diagnosis takes access and stability, and addiction tends to take both — so the physical conditions that may drive the sensitivity beneath it usually go unrecognized. The addiction gets seen; the reason rarely does.

I was the one who got diagnosed. I’m autistic, and like many autistic people I also have a connective tissue disorder — hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome — and the conditions that travel with it. That’s where my own sensitivity comes from. What I keep returning to is that the suffering underneath addiction is often a real, physical sensitivity, and that reaching for something to quiet it can be less a choice than an attempt to cope.

When something finally steadied that sensitivity, what shifted wasn’t just my mood — it was the constant pull to reach for relief. I can’t prove all of why that worked, and SPI is careful to separate what the evidence establishes from what’s still a hypothesis. But I had the access to see a pattern my family couldn’t get named, and I’d rather help people step off that path early — before addiction takes hold — than leave the reason unseen again.

Where we are

We are in early conversation with research groups in the US and Europe; and growing a patient research-interest registry that demonstrates recruitment feasibility to prospective study teams.