1st Edition
by Alexandra Brewis (Author), Amber Wutich (Author)
How well-intentioned public health efforts can be unwitting but powerful drivers of stigma.
Stigma
is a dehumanizing process, a method of shaming and blaming that is
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 another side of the issue: the
startling fact that well-intentioned public health campaigns can create
new and sometimes damaging stigma, even when they are 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.
