Strategic Interventions in Mental Health Rhetoric

Offering rhetorically informed strategic interventions, this innovative collection moves beyond critiques of mental health issues, problems, and care. With sections that focus on methodological, cultural and legal, and pedagogical interventions, readers will find an engaging discussion of a discrete mental health phenomenon as well as a clear interventional takeaway in each chapter. Contributors make use of critical discourse analyses, ethnographic inquiries, autoethnographic inquiries, case studies, and textual analyses to engage such mental health research topics as postpartum depression among Chinese mothers; insanity pleas; anosognosia; issues of intimacy, access, and embodiment in research projects; community support groups; Black mental health; women in Alcoholics Anonymous; and mental health in faculty workshops and university online health tools. The authors and editors create scholarship on mental health that explicitly builds productive methodological, theoretical, and practical bridges among scholars and teachers in the various specialties of writing and communication. This collection will interest scholars, students, and practitioners in health and medical humanities; rhetoric of health and medicine; health communication; medical anthropology; scientific and technical communication; disability studies; and rhetorical studies generally.

Lisa Melonçon is Professor of Technical Communication at the University of South Florida. She specializes in rhetoric of health and medicine and disability studies. Cathryn Molloy is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in James Madison University's School of Writing, Rhetoric and Technical Communication.

Introduction: Interventions in Mental Health Rhetoric Research Cathryn Molloy & Lisa Melonçon Part One: Methodological Interventions 1. A theory of collective intimacy Lisa Melonçon & Lora Arduser 2. Reflections on Research as it Unfolds: Inclusive Tactics as a Methodological Intervention Sean Kamperman 3. Culture-centered approaches to rhetorical research: Considering domestic violence as a site for intersectional interventions Lisa DeTora & Tomeka Robinson Part Two: Legal, Cultural, and Institutional Interventions 4. Facilitating Rhetoric: Paratherapeutic Activity in Community Support Groups Nora K. Augustine 5. Women of Dignity and Grace: The Politics of Respectability in Alcoholics Anonymous Lori J. Joseph & Stephanie Kelley-Romano 6. Rhetorical Crocheting: New Chinese Moms Fighting Postpartum Depression in Social Media Hua Wang 7. Rerouting Stigma: Leading with Law in Mental Health Rhetoric Research Mark A. Hannah & Susie Salmon 8. Destigmatizing Black Mental Health: A Gay Black Woman's Experience Tianna Cobb 9. An Autoethnographic Examination of Anosognosia in a Sibling Exhibiting Severe Psychosis: Reimagining Inclusiveness in MHRR Cynthia Ryan Part Three: Pedagogical and Co-Curricular Interventions 10. Toward an Empathy-First Approach to Student Mental Health: A Guide for Faculty Development Lynn Reid 11. "Do You Feel Like :(": Discursive Interventions in University Mental Health Rhetorics Leslie R. Anglesey & Adam Hubrig 12. Online University Mental Health Tools: Definitions and Narratives as Interventions Barbara George & Rachael Blasiman