Someone casts vote for stigma

The co-founder of The Hastings Center, a bioethics research institution, has some controversial ideas about the stigma that so many in the behavioral health community seek to combat.

Daniel Callahan, the Garrison, N.Y.-based institution’s president emeritus, contends that successful efforts to combat the public health crisis of widespread smoking included some stigmatization of smokers—sending the message that their behavior was socially unacceptable in addition to being unhealthy. In an article he wrote for the Hastings Center Report, Callahan argues that the same approach (he calls it “stigmatization lite”) should be applied to another public health issue: obesity.

Callahan states that obesity “may be the most difficult and elusive public health problem the United States has ever encountered” and that efforts to address it so far have met with little success. He believes that if existing public health strategies were supplemented with messages urging overweight individuals “to consider the threat of discrimination itself as a danger to be avoided,” better results could be achieved.

What do you think of these comments? Should public health strategies venture beyond issues of health into a more social/personal realm? Can stigmatization ever be a positive?