Lazy, Crazy, and Disgusting: Stigma and the Undoing of Global Health

by Alexandra Brewis

After all, innocent people don’t get lung cancer.

it is stigma that is truly health damaging and deadly.

Disease is a particular magnet for stigma exactly because stigma tends to attach to “what matters most” to people.

because shaming people into building and paying for their own toilets is so much cheaper than providing them with the required hardware.

The national cholera campaign slogan, “Get out cholera!” sounded to them like “Get out, you worthless, cholera-infected person.”

wasn’t dirty water spreading disease, people said, but the “dirty Haitian” migrant workers.

It’s cast as a deadly epidemic caused by fat people’s bad choices.

weight stigma has been called the last socially acceptable discrimination.

Socially acceptable, discriminatory, anti-fat attitudes are deepening and spreading. Fat stigma is now a global problem.

Many see consults with obese patients simply as a waste of their time.

Increasingly, we make our living sitting at a desk. It should be no surprise then that we weigh more.