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.

Drawing on our experiences with qualitative research involving health and medical topics to which we have a personal connection, this dialogue asks scholars in RHM to consider key methodological issues in embodied research by exploring: the choice to take up inquiries with which we have personal connections; the ethics of representation within these projects; and determining if, how, when, and to what degree we should reveal these connections in the research write-ups themselves. Our conversation is characterized by a “heuristic orientation”—defined as intuitive, creative, and generative. We conclude by offering a heuristic tool for researchers to use as they make crucial decisions in embodied research in RHM.