How and why the idea of wellness holds such rhetorical--and
harmful--power.
In Why Wellness Sells, Colleen Derkatch examines why the concept of
wellness holds such rhetorical power in contemporary culture. Public
interest in wellness is driven by two opposing philosophies of health
that cycle into and amplify each other: restoration, where people use
natural health products to restore themselves to prior states of
wellness; and enhancement, where people strive for maximum wellness by
optimizing their body's systems and functions.
Why Wellness Sells tracks the tension between these two ideas of
wellness across a variety of sources, including interviews, popular and
social media, advertising, and online activism. Derkatch examines how
wellness manifests across multiple domains, where being "well" means
different things, ranging from a state of pre-illness to an empowered
act of good consumer-citizenship, from physical or moral purification to
sustenance and care, and from harm reduction to optimization. Along the
way, Derkatch demonstrates that the idea of wellness may promise access
to the good life, but it serves primarily as a strategy for coping with
a devastating and overwhelming present.
Drawing on scholarship in the rhetoric of health and medicine, the
health and medical humanities, and related fields, Derkatch offers a
nuanced account of how language, belief, behavior, experience, and
persuasion collide to produce and promote wellness, one of the most
compelling--and harmful--concepts that govern contemporary Western life.
She explains that wellness has become so pervasive in the United States
and Canada because it is an ever-moving, and thus unachievable, goal.
The concept of wellness entrenches an individualist model of health as a
personal responsibility, when collectivist approaches would more readily
serve the health and well-being of whole populations.
