Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. Disgusting
Chapter 1. Dealing with Defecation
Chapter 2. Dirty Things, Disgusting People
Chapter 3. Dirty and Disempowered
Part II. Lazy
Chapter 4. Fat, Bad, and Everywhere
Chapter 5. The Tyranny of Weight Judgment
Chapter 6. World War O
Part III. Crazy
Chapter 7. Once Crazy, Always Crazy
Chapter 8. The Myth of the Destigmatized Society
Chapter 9. Completely Depressing
Conclusion. What We Can Do
Appendix. Stigma: A Brief Primer
Notes
Index

Promotional Information

How stigma derails well-intentioned public health efforts, creating suffering and worsening inequalities.

About the Author

Alexandra Brewis and Amber Wutich are both President's Professors in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University, where Brewis founded and Wutich now directs the Center for Global Health. Brewis is the author of Obesity: Cultural and Biocultural Perspectives. Wutich is a coauthor of Analyzing Qualitative Data: Systematic Approaches. Together, they are coauthors of Fat in Four Cultures: A Global Ethnography of Weight and Extreme Weight Loss: Life Before and After Bariatric Surgery.

Reviews

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

This is a social justice–informed and critically important book for students, scholars, professionals, and policy makers in public health, medical anthropology, health-related social work, and health justice.
—Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work