Those who love people with dementia often experience the phenomenon of ambiguous loss, where the individual with dementia is both present and absent. This essay analyzes Kirsten Johnson's 2020 documentary Dick Johnson is Dead as a performance of ambiguity, extending Arthur Frank's (2013) framework of illness narratives and Kenneth Burke's (1945) concept of ambiguity. I propose that narrative ambiguity can serve as an organizing heuristic for understanding the complexity of ambiguous loss and dementia. The essay examines four key aspects of narrative ambiguity in the film: the ambiguity of presence, time, persona, and setting. By exploring these components, I demonstrate that performing an ambiguous narrative can foster acceptance of ambiguity for both the performer and the audience. Narrative ambiguity offers a valuable alternative framework for understanding ambiguous loss and broader narratives about individuals with dementia.

What makes societies see, acknowledge, and constitute an issue as a crisis which should be acted upon? We address this by examining a specific instance of media attention to a creeping health crisis, namely the communication of an individual non-governmental actor, the influencer Ingeborg Senneset. We ask: What is the rhetorical agency of an individual opinion leader (influencer) in a health risk situation such as the creeping AMR-crisis? Our study demonstrates that the rhetorical agency of Senneset as an influencer rests on three interrelated communicative strategies: First, she enacts what we term a multiple ethos implying both the expertise of a professional and the authenticity of an ordinary person; Second, she uses narratives of fear with a rational grounding; Third, she establishes and works rhetorically within a diverse digital ecology where she publishes, posts, and comments on several different platforms, where the different posts and publications reinforce each other.

This essay investigates the contemporary association between attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and delinquent behavior. Long before its diagnostic appearance as ADD in the DSM III (1980), youth behavior associated with hyperactivity and impulsivity was rhetorically situated within an ecology of delinquency science which yoked these behaviors to criminality. Because rhetorics of criminality are profoundly racialized in the U.S., a close study of ADHD and delinquency must contend with the ways racial discourses have determined conceptualizations of juvenile behavior, particularly in educational contexts.  Through an analysis of two rhetorical case studies, I demonstrate how hyperactivity and restlessness were initially associated with delinquency by proponents of the mental hygiene movement in the 1920s. The same behaviors were later imbued with sinister and antisocial meanings by a white public responding to school desegregation in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Seen from this perspective, the contemporary rhetoric of ADHD can be understood as a type of delinquency rhetoric from its inception.

Children, as a result of age, social status, and developmental stage, depend upon caregivers and medical professionals to interpret health discourse. However, children have largely gone unexamined in research on visual health communication. Because children are a vulnerable audience, rhetoricians should more closely attend to texts addressing them. This article analyzes 147 children’s picture books about COVID-19. These texts draw on the rhetorical concept of identification to encourage readers to take up particular health behaviors. These texts illuminate three specific risks of using identification to instantiate health behaviors in children: failing to acknowledge material limitations on children’s agency, glossing over the risks of infection, and distorting scientific discourse. Ultimately, while the majority of the texts in our corpus articulate the need for a community-centered approach, only a handful acknowledge directly that children’s agency and power are limited. These texts, therefore, also highlight a larger issue beyond the coronavirus: the difficulty of relying on an individual health imperative in communicating public health—an inherently communal enterprise.

This article argues that the field of rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) needs queer and (trans)formative methodologies to support a disempowered, ignored, and devalued queer community. Building directly from Mohan J. Dutta’s (2022) work, the article 1) addresses that RHM scholarly practices attend to whiteness and neglect to amplify queer and transgender interventional and rhetorical approaches; 2) develops a methodology–institutional critique–for RHM practitioners that crosses disciplinary boundaries to showcase cistematic oppression at infrastructural, structural, institutional, and interpersonal levels; and 3) provides a personal medical story that showcases how institutions fail transgender and queer patients. Through this work, this article argues for the need for rhetorical methodological intervention in RHM research and to mobilize transgender rhetorical agency through coalitional building.

Extending Sarah Singer and Jordynn Jack’s (2020) definition of illness chronicity as a complex rhetorical process of identification, this essay suggests that the development of specific temporal vocabularies (ways of defining and describing time) is an important part of this process, one that precedes and enables identification. Drawing from underemphasized temporal themes in Kenneth Burke’s work, this essay analyzes a collection of public descriptions of chronic depression to identify implicit patterns of temporal vocabulary development and to consider how these patterns relate to identification. The analysis shows that descriptions of chronic depression consistently utilize what Burke termed “directional” strategies of definition, which center permanence as the essence of the illness experience, obscuring recognition of change. While this definitional strategy enables two potentially ameliorative disidentifications, it comes at the expense of precluding kairos, which requires a dialectically-intact temporal vocabulary featuring terms of both permanence and change.

America’s individualistic culture is reflected in deeply held beliefs about how people should manage their health and their (lack of) money. In this essay, we trace the ideological discourse of individualism at macro and micro levels, explicating how macro-level discourses surrounding finances and health fulfill key functions of individualism: explanatory and evaluative as well as identity and prescriptive. For each function, we illustrate at the micro level how social adherence to discourses of individualism affects people, relationships, and communities. In particular, we argue, failure to live up to individualistic ideals fosters internalized shame and guilt and worsens mental, physical, and financial health. Grounded in critical rhetorical theory and drawing upon critical interpersonal and family communication and health communication approaches, we illustrate how individualistic discourse is circulated and taken up by people, constituting their identities and relationships. We also showcase the benefits of investigating exigent social issues from multidisciplinary vantage points.

Abstract  Guided by normative rhetorical theory, this study utilizes thematic analysis to explore narratives about sterilization consultations posted by childfree patients and medical providers to Reddit. This study explores the multiple meanings of sterilization, the paradoxical dilemmas competing conversational purposes create, and the communicative practices, interpretive lenses, and environmental resources patients and providers employ to manage dilemmas. The analysis reveals that voluntary sterilization inheres task, relational, and identity meanings for both patients and providers, creating paradoxical dilemmas and rendering sterilization consultations additionally challenging to navigate. Patients and providers both accept and confront paradox, adopt cultural and contextual interpretive lenses to evaluate others’ talk, and rely on childfree patient and physician social networks as environmental resources to shift the context in which talk occurs. The conclusion offers theoretical implications for normative rhetorical theory and practical implications, including: illuminating features influencing interactions in which sterilization requests are made and evaluated, and underscoring the multiple meanings that constrain patients and providers during these consultations.

This article examines the rhetorical effects of a rape accusation on the survivor and on the survivor’s community of social justice activists. Relying on interviews with the survivor and with the community affected by the allegation, the article analyzes responses to the allegation, articulates how those responses are informed by rape culture, and illustrates how those responses affected the survivor and her rhetorical agency. The article argues that rhetorical agency can be productively distributed across various allies to assist survivors and help restore the rhetorical agency that rape erodes. Establishing sexual assault as a public health issue, the article recommends broad education in rhetorical listening to improve how those entrusted to hear assault stories listen, respond, and, when appropriate, help survivors speak or act.

Using primary source materials from medical, government, and journalism archives, this study of public medical discourse reveals the role of argumentation in posi­tively shaping public perceptions of traumatized soldiers and locates the contem­porary origins of the trope of “soldier as psychological victim of war”—a perception that continues to inform public policy and medical research. Using Jasinski’s (1998) concepts of interior and exterior constitutive potential to analyze the public writ­ings, interviews, and Congressional testimony of VVAW-affiliated psychiatrists, the study finds that the radical psychiatrists’ interior (directed at veterans) and exte­rior (directed at public and medical institutions) rhetorics were (and arguably remain) mutually effective in creating an identity for veterans to occupy that exculpated them from their involvement in war, while allowing them to garner benefits for their ser­vice. The article concludes with two examples of the “veteran as psychological vic­tim of war” trope as it shapes the contemporary rhetorical ecology of former servicemembers.

This study describes and analyzes a sample of noncommercial web pages that address cancer genetic testing. These “gateway documents,” which were returned in an initial Internet search for information, may serve as the only texts that peo­ple read when deciding whether to pursue genetic testing. Deliberative rhetorical theory elaborated into dimensions of embodied knowledge and scientific knowl­edge was mapped onto problematic integration theory to create a framework for investigating the documents. Analysis reveals the contingent nature of evaluating probability in genetic testing and the intrinsic need to examine the rhetorical con­struction of gateway documents as multidimensional communication events in which disadvantages and benefits shift—and sometimes transpose—according to the embodied knowledge of each person. Benefits and disadvantages of genetic test­ing become topoi that healthcare providers should consider carefully to improve the decision-making information offered to people who are searching for online resources.

Public health advocates often encounter the arduous rhetorical situation of championing issues assumed to be personal. One such rhetorical situation can be observed in pro-caregiving advocacy rhetoric; organizations promoting public policy attention for unpaid family caregivers. This essay argues that pro-caregiving advocates invite public action by persuasively advancing personal and public problems that impact caregivers, care-receivers, taxpayers, and businesses; however, in their policy statements, advocates undo the likelihood of public action by creating a partial solution that emphasizes the preferred location of home care and de-emphasizes the ways in which the financial and health-related caregiver problems get solved. The essay concludes with rhetorical lessons that highlight the practical applicability of argumentation methodology for scholars and practitioners of public health advocacy. In doing so, this essay offers practical tools to evaluate and reposition the efforts of health advocates moving an issue from personal to public.

Scholars have criticized the rhetoric of compliance for decades. For example, they have offered a more nuanced account of why patients are “noncompliant,” recasting noncompliance itself as rational behavior. While these insights made important strides toward the larger goal of disrupting power dynamics within medical encounters, and while they yielded new rhetorical inventions such as adherence and concordance, these new terms retained many of compliance’s problematic features. Building on the work of rhetoricians of health and medicine and other scholars, we cast compliance’s persistence as a symptom of shortcomings in the dominant medical model and its tendency to discipline individual patients instead of work with communities to facilitate health. We argue that this model is being challenged in especially dramatic ways with the increased focus on populations and communities. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault to understand how to navigate problems associated with the disciplinary approach, the authors argue not just for a better understanding of the causes of noncompliance, but for a post-compliance conception of medicine. Among other things, such a view of medicine will require new rhetorical structures that can better support the aims of population health and community-based medicine.

In the introduction to the inaugural double issue, we presented our vision for RHM’s ethos as a dwelling place (Hyde, 2004) for those doing rhetorically oriented work in health and medicine, and as an ambassadorial site for demonstrating how rhetorical study in all of its forms can inform the work of health and medicine’s wider stakeholders and practices. In this introduction, we aim to extend this call by imagining the journal as a site for building a community of practice, which, according to Etienne Wenger and Beverly Wenger-Trayner (2015), can be defined as “a group of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do, and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly” (para 1). This theory of social learning includes the three “modes of identification”1 (Wenger, 2010)—namely engagement, alignment, and imagination—through which the journal helps shape the identity of the now-emerged community of RHM scholars.