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.

This article examines the rhetorical productivity of ambiguity in the context of a loosely-defined mood disorder formally known as dysthymia, referred to colloquially as mild depression. First, the article offers a rhetorical history of the unusual institutional conditions under which this definitionally ambiguous diagnostic entity was constructed prior to its debut in the DSM-III. Second, the article explores how dysthymia’s definitional ambiguity functions as a rhetorical resource in the context of contemporary online health interactions.

As we enter an era of so-called Do it Yourself health, “patient agency” has become a dominant theme in public discourses of health and medicine. Despite increased salience, patient agency remains a vague term that is capable of being operationalized and moralized in ways that escape attention. To illustrate this, I chart common rhetorical configurations of patient agency in public discourses of health and medicine, and in doing so find that patient agency is commonly rhetoricized as one of three overlapping patient capacities: the capacity to know, the capacity to prevent, and the capacity to decide. Ultimately, I argue that these three rhetorics of patient agency can be deployed to cultivate health subjectivities imbued with untenable ideals of individual control that constrain, rather than open, patients’ rhetorical choices.