Description
Book SynopsisHow and why the idea of wellness holds such rhetoricaland harmfulpower. 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 o
Trade Review'Wellness is ever present in lives increasingly lived in crisis,' Colleen Derkatch writes in her book
Why Wellness Sells. Wellness, she argues, presents collective social ills as problems for the individual to solve through some alchemy of consumer behavior.
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The GuardianTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter One. Wellness as Incipient Illness
Chapter Two. Wellness as Self-Management
Chapter Three. Wellness as Harm Reduction
Chapter Four. Wellness as Survival Strategy
Chapter Five. Wellness as Optimization
Chapter Six. Wellness as Performance
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
