Lazy, Crazy, and Disgusting
Stigma and the Undoing of Global Health
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 c...
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. "This engaging book . . . fills a significant gap in the literature by providing a wake-up call to scholars and practitioners unfamiliar with the topic. And it reminds me that we should all be working together to avoid any unintended consequences of promoting health."--Nature "Lazy, Crazy, and Disgusting is an impeccably researched, collaborative, thought-provoking, and boundary-breaking book that should be required reading for anyone interested in public health, medicine, and anthropology."--Medical Anthropology Quarterly "Brewis and Wutich provide a very useful primer on stigma, which gives a succinct explanation of what stigma is in relation to global health, its different forms, and how stigmatization intersects with other population-level and individual-level effects. As an important topic for students of medicine, global health, and ethics, Lazy, Crazy, and Disgusting would be a useful recommended text."--The Lancet: Diabetes and Endocrinology "Brewis and Wutich's book offers a rigorous analysis of how public global health efforts can create and reinforce stigma . . . This book is recommended for anyone with a general interest in global public health, [and for] undergraduate and postgraduate students from health-related disciplines including medical sociology. This book should be considered by health practitioners, scholars and public health professionals when designing and implementing health-related interventions."--Sociology of Health and Illness "The global perspective and illuminating detail in Lazy, Crazy, and Disgusting bring the social, cultural and structural elements of stigma into focus for the reader . . . This text is both academic and accessible, making it an engrossing read for those interested in medicine and public health, anthropology and sociology. I would argue it is also incredibly relevant to those who experience, resist or perpetuate stigma: each and every one of us."--Organization "The book provides an accessible, synthetic, and critical examination of the health effects of shame and stigma, one that was already long overdue when the book was published in 2019. That was before the onset of the current pandemic. The topic is of even more pressing concern now, when the public's health depends so much on the behavior of individuals."--American Scientist "The best thing about this book is that it is relatable on personal, institutional, and global levels. The book provides a timely contribution to the state of global health, especially the process of stigmatizing people with infectious disease."--Teaching Sociology
