How stigma derails well-intentioned public health efforts, creating
suffering and worsening inequalities.
2020 Winner, Society for Anthropological Sciences Carol R. Ember Book
Prize, Shortlisted for the British Sociological Association's Foundation
for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize
Stigma is a dehumanizing process, where shaming and blaming are embedded
in our beliefs about who does and does not have value within society. In
Lazy, Crazy, and Disgusting, medical anthropologists Alexandra Brewis
and Amber Wutich explore a darker side of public health: that
well-intentioned public health campaigns can create new and damaging
stigma, even when they are otherwise successful.
Brewis and Wutich present a novel, synthetic argument about how stigmas
act as a massive driver of global disease and suffering, killing or
sickening billions every year. They focus on three of the most complex,
difficult-to-fix global health efforts: bringing sanitation to all,
treating mental illness, and preventing obesity. They explain how and
why humans so readily stigmatize, how this derails ongoing public health
efforts, and why this process invariably hurts people who are already at
risk. They also explore how new stigmas enter global health so easily
and consider why destigmatization is so very difficult. Finally, the
book offers potential solutions that may be able to prevent, challenge,
and fix stigma. Stigma elimination, Brewis and Wutich conclude, must be
recognized as a necessary and core component of all global health
efforts.
Drawing on the authors' keen observations and decades of fieldwork,
Lazy, Crazy, and Disgusting combines a wide array of ethnographic
evidence from around the globe to demonstrate conclusively how stigma
undermines global health's basic goals to create both health and
justice.
