The wellness industry was built to serve those who are already well—and shuts out those who are not

What Will It Take for Wellness To Finally Leave Behind Its Ableist Origins? | Well+Good

The current wellness movement, says Mckenzie, assumes that everyone has the same goal of striving to be the best and healthiest version of themselves. “But some people are just trying to survive,” she says.

What it means to live “well” and the goals of wellness need to expand to accommodate this reality. Our singular, idealized image of perfect health (you can picture her: the thin, able-bodied, uber-successful wellness maven who fits in a Peloton ride at 5:00 a.m. before working a full day and then feeding her kids a nutritious dinner and tucking them into bed) must be replaced with individualized definitions of wellness that take into account inevitable, unavoidable, and often incurable health conditions. The wellness goal for some people may be to “slightly improve their quality of life or change their mindset,” says Mckenzie.

What Will It Take for Wellness To Finally Leave Behind Its Ableist Origins? | Well+Good

Currently, one in four adults in the United States have some sort of disability. And what’s more, not a single person on Earth will remain in perfect health forever, Harrison points out. Wellness culture needs to embrace this reality so that it can actually promote well-being under any circumstances. “I think we as a society could be more open to accepting that people get sick and get old and die and have disabilities,” says Harrison. “Because then the world would be a much more hospitable place for the disabled.”

What Will It Take for Wellness To Finally Leave Behind Its Ableist Origins? | Well+Good

Frequently absent from the wellness literature is an acknowledgment that such issues as poverty, race, gender identity, and structural inequities act as impediments for many students in schools.

 All Students Must Thrive : Transforming Schools to Combat Toxic Stressors and Cultivate Critical Wellness

Disability is a form of diversity, not a synonym for unhealthy.

Ableism is the wellness issue we’re not addressing | Well+Good

Healthism

Healthism’s framing of well-being as a series of correct choices perpetuates the idea that if you are ill, it must be because you made incorrect choices.

What Will It Take for Wellness To Finally Leave Behind Its Ableist Origins? | Well+Good

This idea that good health is both a personal responsibility and a moral obligation is what’s been called “healthism,” a term attributed to political scientist Robert Crawford, PhD. In 1980, Dr. Crawford wrote an article for the International Journal of Health Services called “Healthism and the Medicalization of Everyday Life,” in which he defines the term as “the preoccupation with personal health as a primary—often the primary—focus for the definition and achievement of well-being; a goal which is to be attained primarily through the modification of life styles, with or without therapeutic help.” Dr. Crawford writes: “For the healthist, solution rests within the individual’s determination to resist culture, advertising, institutional and environmental constraints, disease agents, or, simply, lazy or poor personal habits.”

As Chopra discovered, healthism disproportionately harms individuals with disabilities and chronic illnesses, for whom “perfect health,” as defined by limited cultural standards, may never be a possibility. But this way of thinking didn’t begin in the ‘80s: It’s been integral to modern wellness culture from the beginning.

What Will It Take for Wellness To Finally Leave Behind Its Ableist Origins? | Well+Good

The idea of wellness centers around being the best we absolutely could be by embracing healthy lifestyles and habits, but makes one big assumption: we are all able-bodied, and most issues are solvable through healthy eating, exercise, and potentially even expensive products. Baked into this is a healthy dose of ableism—preconceived notions and stereotypes towards people with disabilities. Whenever I look at trends surrounding food choices, exercise, or products, the people speaking about them or benefitting are overwhelmingly able-bodied.

Ableism is the wellness issue we’re not addressing | Well+Good

Critical Wellness

Critical wellness in education is a concept that addresses the role of race, culture, trauma, mental health, social emotional* well-being, bias, identity, and adverse circumstances that inhibit students’ ability to be whole in the pursuit of education. And it does so without placing these issues within a deficit-laden framework that blames children, families, and communities for their circumstances. This book argues that the concept of critical wellness is vital to correcting school inequity. It also provides strategies for implementing a critical wellness framework in a class, a classroom, a school, or throughout a school district. 

All Students Must Thrive : Transforming Schools to Combat Toxic Stressors and Cultivate Critical Wellness

Critical wellness in education brings together three theoretical frameworks that have relevance for equity in schools: wellness, critical pedagogy, and critical race theory.

 All Students Must Thrive : Transforming Schools to Combat Toxic Stressors and Cultivate Critical Wellness

Fuck Your Healthy. Fuck Your Wellness.

The idea of wellness, especially individual, consumer practices of self-care (like massages), is often confused with healing justice. Healing justice is inherently anti-capitalist. Full disclosure, I was among many activists and organizers who are partially responsible for how wellness became something that you buy at a Walgreens. Like most poorly thought-out shitty strategies, this particular moment in conversations about wellness started out with good intentions.3

In the 1990s, Liberatory Harm Reductionists and radical healers began to use the word wellness as a response to the use of the word healthy. Everywhere we went there was the looming judgment of “healthy choices,” “healthy food,” or “healthy habits.” While the word health was predetermined, you had to be born with it or buy it; the word wellness felt broader at the time. We put it on zines and names of activist projects, and generally plastered the word wellness everywhere we could as a pushback on the MIC’s view of health and to challenge healthism.4

Healthism stands in contrast to both healing justice and Liberatory Harm Reduction, which are grounded not only in ideas of collective care but also in the thinking that physical and mental health cannot be “achieved” and does not have a singular destination or representation. Healthism is inherently ableist, not survivor led, nor does it try to understand how generational, individual/collective trauma impacts our collective bodies and lives. Harm reduction and healing justice counter healthism because they embrace what Glenn Marla, radical activist and art therapist, says perfectly: “There is no wrong way to have a body.”

Pushing back on the overwhelming healthism that is embedded in concepts of healing is too little discussed among both mainstream harm-reduction and healing justice practitioners alike. Healers, activists, and practitioners of all kinds are equally flummoxed by the multitude of creative ways that we, as survivors, queer and transgender people, people with disabilities, drug users and sex workers, are living in our bodies on our own terms. We—drug users, sex workers, queer and transgender people—have long demanded body autonomy, and we will not stop until we have reclaimed the right to be in our bodies and make decisions for ourselves—at all times.

Page, Cara; Woodland, Erica. Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care, and Safety (pp. 90-91). North Atlantic Books.

Further Reading