The chapters in this volume, drawn primarily from medical anthropology, highlight the diverse ways in which various stigmatized health conditions interact with social inequalities and stigma to form syndemics. Authors delineate multiple examples of stigma-driven syndemics, to demonstrate both the nature of disease-disease interactions and how stigma contributes to, promotes, exacerbates, or perpetuates a syndemic. In doing so, authors also address how stigma translates from a social condition to affect biological conditions. The chapters range in topic from substance abuse, obesity, and...

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...