Lazy, Crazy, and Disgusting - How Stigma is Everywhere

What is stigma? And how does it affect a person’s mental health and quality of life? In today’s Psych Central Podcast, Gabe talks with anthropologists Alex Brewis and Amber Wutich about the deeply dehumanizing impact of stigma in society. Whether it’s your mental health diagnosis, your neighborhood, your race or your inability to meet society’s standards in some way, stigma is alive and well in today’s world. People may even stigmatize themselves, intensifying their suffering.

Why are people so quick to stigmatize? And how does stigma affect mental health treatment? Tune into the show for an in-depth look at how humans tend to label others (and themselves) -- often without even thinking about it.

For more information and a complete transcript, visit Podcast: Lazy, Crazy, and Disgusting - How Stigma is Everywhere.

Guest Information for 'Alex Brewis & Amber Wutich – Lazy, Crazy, and Disgusting' Podcast Episode



Alexandra Brewis (Slade) is a President's Professor and Founding Director of the Center for Global Health at ASU.

Trained as an anthropologist, Alex's scholarship is currently focused on how stigma, poverty, gender and other forms of social and economic exclusion and marginalization shape our health and human biology. With a long career of leading mixed-method community-based field research at multiple sites across the globe, much of her current research brings together large and diverse teams, addressing such challenges as water insecurity, improving development project design and monitoring, and properly tailored anti-obesity efforts.

At ASU, Brewis Slade teaches global health and anthropology. She is an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) fellow and currently serves as president of the Human Biology Association. As an administrator at ASU, she founded the Center for Global Health in 2006 and served as Director of the School of Human Evolution and Social Change (2010-2017) and Associate Vice President for Social Sciences (2014-2017). She currently serves as President of the Human Biology Association.

Professor Brewis received a doctorate in anthropology from University of Arizona (1992) and was an Andrew W Mellon Foundation postdoctoral fellow in demography at Brown University. Before joining ASU in 2005, she taught at University of Auckland and University of Georgia.

Amber Wutich is a President’s Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Global Health at Arizona State University. Her two decades of community-based fieldwork are concerned with how inequitable and unjust resource institutions impact people’s well-being, especially under conditions of poverty. An expert on water insecurity and mental health, she directs the Global Ethnohydrology Study, a cross-cultural study of water knowledge and management. Wutich maintains longstanding ties in her field sites in Paraguay and Bolivia, and manages a strategic alliance between la Universidad Católica–Itapúa (Paraguay) and ASU. An ethnographer and methodologist with over 100 peer-reviewed publications, Wutich edits the journal Field Methods and coauthored Analyzing Qualitative Data: Systematic Approaches (2016, SAGE). Her teaching has been recognized with awards such as Carnegie CASE Arizona Professor of the Year. Wutich has raised over $34 million in research funds, as part of collaborative research teams, from the National Science Foundation, USDA, and other funders. Wutich’s latest book, coauthored with Dr. Alexandra Brewis, is Lazy, Crazy, and Disgusting: Stigma and the Undoing of Global Health (2019, Johns Hopkins University Press).

About The Psych Central Podcast Host



Gabe Howard is an award-winning writer and speaker who lives with bipolar disorder. He is the author of the popular book, Mental Illness is an Asshole and other Observations, available from Amazon; signed copies are also available directly from the author. To learn more about Gabe, please visit his website, gabehoward.com.