The Place of Mental Health Rhetoric Research (MHRR) in Rhetoric of Health & Medicine and Beyond

In the inaugural issue of RHM, the editors invited J. Fred Reynolds (2018) to compose a "A Short History of Mental Health Rhetoric Research (MHRR)" in which he compellingly documented the "significant body of work applying the tools and terms of rhetoric to the world of mental health" that emerged in the 1980s and continued through the decades that followed, if in fits and starts (p. 1). As Reynolds documented, in the past, rhetoricians have studied issues of mental health from a variety of (inter)disciplinary angles: technical/professional writing vantages (Reynolds & Mair, 2013; Berkenkotter, 2008; Holladay, 2017); critiques of the linguistic entanglements of the professionals who seek to treat mental health (McCarthy & Gerring, 1994; Berkenkotter & Ravotas, 1997); examinations of how publics encounter and make sense of mental difference (Leweicki-Wilson, 2003; Segal, 2008; Emmons, 2010; J. Johnson, 2010; Price, 2011; Rothfelder & Thornton, 2017); and through studies of "patients'" discursive behaviors (Prendergast, 2001; Molloy, 2015; Uthappa, 2017).

Reynolds' history raises important questions on how the issues and challenges unique to MHRR create space for the field to set a specific agenda for its development—to make explicit the major epistemological assumptions, the key questions, and the various vantage points that will undergird the future of this important area of inquiry. Reynolds' remarks, thus, helped to sketch out the history of MHRR as well as to establish it as an important research area for the future of RHM. While a number of fields examine issues of mental health from a humanistic perspective, rhetorical research on mental health distinguishes itself through a focus on discursive and symbolic communication—especially acts of persuasion and identification. Rhetorical approaches are not limited to textual analysis, however, and also account for factors such as social conditions, identity, embodiment, power relations, location, materiality, and circulation. MHRR, thus, attends to the rhetorics of neuroscience, medicine, and psychiatry in connection with their cultural warrants; places judgments of in/sanity in rhetorical-historical context; follows mental health categories and diagnoses through clinical, professional, and personal settings; considers representations of mental health in medical and professional documents as well as popular media; and connects rhetorical appeals to strategies of activism and advocacy.

This special issue, in many ways, builds and expands on that work by bringing together a diversity of rhetorical perspectives on mental health—compositions that will undoubtedly inspire more work in this crucial area of study. Rather than introducing a new area that RHM scholars might start to consider, though, this special issue continues important work that has already been taking place in the journal and solidifies a commitment from the journal's editors to focus on this extremely important topic going forward. In their introduction to the inaugural issue, editors Lisa Melonçon and J. Blake Scott (2018) point out that RHM is a "dwelling place" for work in the area (p. ix). Emphasizing that "the capaciousness of rhetoric is only matched by the capaciousness of 'health' and 'medicine'" (iv), they are also clear that the journal's purpose is to establish a flexible set of boundaries for the field. In the same way, we set out to produce a special issue that could begin to clarify "flexible boundaries" for MHRR.

Arguably, few research topics in the rhetoric of health and medicine are as rich and incendiary as are mental health-related inquiries. Shrouded in etiological mystery—considered dubious social creations by some and serious brain diseases by others—mental health conditions have much in common with the complicated rhetorical lives of other contested diagnoses and chronic conditions.¹ Symptoms of mental health "problems" are prescribed targeted interventions in the form of medications and therapies on the one end of the spectrum and are celebrated as rich sources of neural diversity on the other, making them quite similar to discourses surrounding disabilities writ large.

That is, mental health-related diagnoses name largely abstract behavioral symptoms and traits that some may call "ill," but others may call these same features "affordances." With so much contestation over what, exactly, constitutes mental...