Nine people with mental health diagnoses wrote a dialogue to discuss how we navigate our conditions and ask for accommodations within an academic setting. We cogitate on the challenges of obtaining a diagnosis, how and when we disclose, the affordances and challenges of our symptoms, seeking accommodations, and advocating for ourselves. We consider how current scholarship and other perspectives are changing the conversation about mental health in the academy. We conclude that while the 2008 revisions to the Americans with Disabilities Act have addressed necessary accommodations, that those with mental health conditions are still seeking access.

This article offers a methodology for conducting large-scale audience analysis called “big data audience analysis” (BDAA). BDAA uses distant reading and thin description to examine a large corpus of text data from online audiences. In this article, that corpus is approximately 450,000 online reader comments. We analyze this corpus through sentiment analysis, statistical analysis, and geolocation to identify trends and patterns in large datasets. BDAA can better prepare TPC researchers for large-scale audience studies.