Self Magazine shuttering means one less publication taking disability seriously

This story was originally for Mother Jones and is republished with permission.

Last week, the publishing conglomerate Condé Nast shuttered Self, a women’s health publication that in recent years had turned to publishing service journalism on chronic health conditions that was both practical and normalized living with chronic illness. Amid a trend of unrealistic articles on longevity and ambiguously defined, MAHA-coded writing on “wellness,” Self was a breath of fresh air.

“SELF has played an important role in shaping conversations around health and wellness,” Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch said in a memo published last week. “However, as audience behaviors shift, we have not seen a path for SELF to continue in its current form as a digital publication.” Lynch’s memo said that health and wellness content would “be integrated into our other brands, including Allure and Glamour.” Self had already gone digital-only and ceased print publication in 2017.

I spoke to chronically ill women who had been dedicated readers of Self about what the magazine, and its closure, meant to them. Self may not have been a revenue driver for Condé, but its work was transformative for readers, quietly shifting away from the typical fare of women’s magazines in the 2000s and 2010s — like problematic weight-loss content — to a more progressive vision of women’s health and wellness.

Self‘s conversational style of writing about health topics made the publication more accessible, said Jaime Seltzer, scientific director of the myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome nonprofit MEAction, who was interviewed by then–editor-in-chief Rachel Miller for a 2022 article that Seltzer said sparked more awareness around ME/CFS and Long Covid and had a major impact on people who were trying to figure out what is happening to their health.

“The more people who know they have a disease, the more they can get the clinical care that they need,” Seltzer said. “A really good article like this is a great way to show a friend or a relative what you’re going through.”

Beth Morton, a migraine care advocate, said she appreciated Self‘s non-stigmatizing articles on the condition by people who lived with migraines themselves. Self “still had an impact,” Morton said, lamenting the decision to shutter the magazine.

Myisha Malone-King, a chronic illness advocate living with Crohn’s disease, said Self made her feel seen and supported when she struggled with getting medical care for an ovarian cyst. “I felt extremely lonely when I was diagnosed,” Malone-King said, calling the publication’s folding “a huge blow.”

Condé Nast hasn’t announced what will happen to Self‘s digital presence and archives, and representatives for the company did not respond to a query about whether the site would stay online — or whether it would follow other folded media outlets, like the feminist publication Bitch Media, which also engaged frequently with chronic illness and disability, into digital oblivion (though some articles from Bitch are being republished in The Flytrap).

Vivian Delchamps Wolf, a disabled and chronically ill professor of English at Dominican University of California, told me how much she valued Self’s ability to capture the social dimensions of chronic illness, as with a piece by its former staff writer Katie Camero on how to navigate friendships with people who don’t seem to get what life with a chronic illness is like.

Reporting in that vein, Delchamps Wolf said, “clearly comes from an authentic space and refuses to present chronic illness as pitiful.”

“It’s so important that journalists address issues like medical racism and other systemic barriers that worsen people’s experiences of chronic illness,” Delchamps Wolf said. “In addition to talking about medical concerns, we have to acknowledge chronic illness as a politically, culturally, and socially marginalized category to bring about substantive change.”

Now, there’s one fewer publication where that can happen.

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Julia Métraux is a reporter at Mother Jones covering disability and public health.