Lexington Books Stigma Syndemics: New Directions in Biosocial Health

Central to this volume, and critical to its unique creative significance and contribution, is the conceptual unification of syndemics and stigma. Syndemics theory is increasingly recognized in social science and medicine as a crucial framework for examining and addressing pathways of interaction between biological and social aspects of chronic and acute suffering in populations. While much research to date addresses known syndemics such as those involving HIV, diabetes, and mental illness, this book explores new directions just beginning to emerge in syndemics research - revealing what syndemics theory can illuminate about, for example the health consequences of socially pathologized pregnancy or infertility, when stigmatization of reproductive options or experiences affect women's health. In other chapters, newly identified syndemics affecting incarcerated or detained individuals are highlighted, demonstrating the physical, psychological, structural, and political-economic effects of stigmatizing legal frameworks on human health, through a syndemic lens. Elsewhere in the volume, scholars examine the stigma of poverty and how it affects both nutritional and oral health. The common thread across all chapters is linkages of social stigmatization, structural conditions, and how these societal forces drive biological and disease interactions affecting human health, in areas not previously explored through these lenses. Review This book unpacks how stigma--of abortion, menstruation, incarceration, immigration, and poverty--cannot be detached from structural vulnerabilities. Social-biological, social-psychological, and biological-psychological interactions exemplify how social experiences cannot be detached from syndemic theory. In these cases, it is the social experience of exclusion through stigmatization that systematically fuels isolation, ostracization, and subjugation from which poor health stems.--Emily Mendenhall, Georgetown UniversityThis book reminds us of the power of stigma and its role as a cog in syndemic interactions. Stigma serves to create and reinforce 'the other.' The crucial role of othering in exposing people to risk, affecting their ability to disclose, limiting their access to care, changing the nature of their care, and creating life long suffering is well explored in this book through a series of case studies. In this volume, authors demonstrate that conditions we might consider as normal, e.g. pregnancy, or minor, such as dental disease, are shown to be caught up in vicious cycles of disease, blame and suffering. This book is a salutary reminder to pay attention to trajectories of blame and that a focus on syndemics allows for tracing the precise pathways of stigma and its effects.--Judith Littleton, University of AucklandStigma Syndemics is a serious and long-overdue examination into one of the most pernicious drivers of widespread affliction. The contributors to this rare collection reveal how stigma in its many forms sits at the center of numerous seemingly intractable challenges. They also issue a clear mandate to overcome the pervasive threat of stigma in its widest sense.--Bobby Milstein, ReThink Health and Massachusetts Institute of Technology About the Author Merrill Singer is a professor of anthropology and senior research scientist at the Center for Health, Intervention and Prevention at the University of Connecticut. He is the author, co-author, or editor of 24 books, including Killer Commodities: Public Health and the Corporate Production of Harm and The War Machine and Global Health.