UC San Diego

Stigma against fat people permeates every level of healthcare, yet most attempts to reduce weight stigma among healthcare providers have shown only marginal results. Fat studies, a field that rigorously interrogates negative assumptions about fatness, can help social psychologists understand weight stigma by centering the pathologization of fatness as a major contributor to weight stigma at the structural and interpersonal level. A fat studies approach also reorients the normative goal of weight stigma interventions from reducing stigma to eradicating stigma and calls for methods that reject weight stigma’s roots in medicine and medical discourse. Even nuanced and sympathetic models of “obesity” cannot combat stigma that is structurally based in medical authority. We applied these principles to develop a new method of weight stigma intervention: direct contact structured through narrative medicine. In a qualitative pilot study, four medical students and two fat activist community members met for five 2-hour narrative medicine workshops over 5 weeks. All participants completed focus group interviews about the experience. Interview transcript analysis revealed that these workshops provided a space for depathologizing, humanizing, empathy-inducing, and power-leveling interactions between medical students and fat people, where members of both groups reported benefiting from the experience. We conclude that non-pathologizing approaches to eradicating weight stigma are not only feasible, but both ethically and methodologically necessary.