‘We’re sedating women with self-care’
Real wellness means having conditions under which we can flourish
The industry claims to offer answers for all our stress and symptoms – but we ‘still lack the fundamentals of wellbeing’. How did this happen?
An Excerpt:
Another reason wellness has mushroomed into its current behemoth is that we are not passive consumers, but active players in our self-optimization. Derkatch, a professor of rhetoric at Toronto Metropolitan University, has analyzed how the language and ideas of wellness have come to permeate our lives.
From social media and magazines at the check-out line to the emails lobbed from HR, we’re bombarded with messages that enjoin us to “take care”, to honor our wellbeing, but also to use “hacks” to boost our languishing productivity and mood. (Case in point, the text on a plastic baggie filled stool sample containers I just received from the GI doc, urges me to “celebrate each day” and “cultivate cheerfulness”.) Derkatch maintains we’ve been recruited into a hamster wheel of constant self-monitoring and surveillance, chasing a past where we were young and spry, while trying to outpace the vulnerabilities lurking in the future.
Derkatch says that real wellness does not require an extensive menu of goods and services. It does not mean we swap out pharmaceuticals for natural products, or screen our tap water for hidden poisons, or sign up for resilience workshops. “Real wellness means having conditions under which we can flourish,” she says. It means social support, medical care that is accessible and empathetic, decent working conditions and ready sources of affordable and nutritious foods.
