About OPIS

The Organisation for the Prevention of Intense Suffering (OPIS) is a think-and-do tank dedicated to a more compassionate world.

Founded in 2016 as a Swiss non-profit association and officially headquartered in Geneva, OPIS advocates for the prevention of intense suffering of all sentient beings, including humans and other animals, as society’s highest ethical priority.

We work to embed these ethics in societal decision-making, promoting effective solutions to some of the worst forms of suffering, within the context of a global system designed to listen to and meet the needs of all.

OPIS relies on private donations to keep our projects running and achieve impact. You can support our work here!

Compassionate governance

Our primary focus is promoting the ethics and principles for a more compassionate world that prioritises the prevention of intense suffering. We develop and execute strategies to achieve this goal most effectively, through both large-scale systemic change and specific policies. We released a wide-ranging publication titled Compassionate Governance in June 2025.

We believe that these ideas are also relevant to the resolution of ongoing conflicts in the world, especially by explicitly addressing the suffering and concrete needs of all people involved.

As part of our vision for a more compassionate world, we call for an end to the torture and abuse of animals, especially on factory farms – in terms of scale, the greatest moral catastrophe of our times – and more generally, against speciesism and the view that animal suffering intrinsically matters less.

Initiatives to relieve pain in humans

OPIS’s first initiatives have focused on better access to effective medications for people in severe pain. We have been advocating internationally for access to mоrphine for terminal cancer patients in low- and middle-income countries, including a successful collaboration with Burkina Faso that led to the launch of a process to define and introduce a national palliative care program with access to morphine.

We are also a prominent advocate for patients with cluster headaches, one of the most excruciating conditions known to medicine, to be able to legally access certain psychedelics that are often dramatically effective in aborting and preventing attacks. Our efforts, through one of the partnerships we established, led to the first Canadian cluster headache patient being granted permission from Health Canada to have his condition treated with psilocybin.

Why “intense” suffering?

“Pain, Plate 4” by Thomas Hawk used under CC BY-NC 2.0 license

Suffering is rarely if ever a good thing in itself, even though it can lead to personal growth and sometimes allows us to appreciate subsequent happiness even more, once the suffering lies safely in the past. And most people are prepared to put up with some suffering as part of life. But the intense suffering of torture or certain chronic diseases can be extreme, even to the point of making life literally unbearable.

This suffering, which cries out to be relieved, is on a whole different level, and it makes minor forms of suffering pale in comparison. Nothing else has greater urgency than preventing or relieving the intense suffering of sentient beings.

Because so much of it is preventable, and in many cases even caused by human beings, it is essential that we explicitly recognise it as our highest priority as a society. OPIS supports all efforts to prevent or reduce any kind of suffering, but the focus on intense suffering ensures that we don’t lose sight of what matters most.

Human and non-human animals

Drawing by Iskra Karadzhova from animation in short film The Battle for Compassion

Suffering, an internal phenomenon, matters for its own sake, regardless of who experiences it, and equal degrees of suffering matter equally. Although we naturally have the greatest empathy for those closest to us and tend to value their lives most, from an objective perspective there is an equivalent need to help any sentient being, human or non-human, who is suffering intensely.

The sheer number of animals suffering on this planet, including the huge numbers kept in horrific conditions on factory farms or otherwise treated with cruelty, means that animal suffering is actually the area with the greatest potential for harm reduction and where the most impact can often be achieved for a given amount of resources. But OPIS is not focused only on non-human animals, as we believe that a holistic and pragmatic approach to preventing suffering on our planet requires that we also address our own suffering.

Collaborations

We collaborate with many other organisations aiming to prevent and relieve suffering through their work. Organisations we have collaborated with include:


OPIS was granted tax-exempt status in Switzerland as a public-benefit organisation.
Our statutes are here in English and French. Our Swiss enterprise identification number (UID) is CHE406600169.

About our logo
The OPIS logo is based on Hathor, the Egyptian goddess of love and joy, who wore a sun disc with cow horns. Love and joy are emotions that are instrumental in reducing suffering and are key elements of the world we strive for. The horns also reflect the significance of animal suffering.