Survivor’s guilt haunts countless veterans, yet little research examines how veterans rhetorically process this experience. This study analyzes poetry from post-9/11 veterans to identify a distinct rhetorical mode we term reparative ethos.  While existing Mental Health Rhetoric Research (MHRR) has identified and extensively explored recuperative ethos—strategies used to restore credibility in the face of externally imposed stigma—we propose that some veterans may also engage in what we call reparative ethos. Unlike recuperative ethos, which addresses externally imposed stigma through appeals to living audiences, reparative ethos aims to make amends to internalized representations of lost comrades. Drawing on Melanie Klein’s object relations theory and MHRR, we analyze poems from Warrior Writers anthologies that explicitly address survivor’s guilt. Our analysis reveals that veterans engage in narrative acts of reparation directed toward deceased others, addressing both the loss of external relationships and threats to internalized military ethos. This research extends MHRR by demonstrating how trauma can generate inward-facing rhetorical strategies focused on healing rather than persuasion, offering new frameworks for understanding veteran mental healthcare and creative expression.

Humira® has been the top selling pharmaceutical since 2014. As a former Humira® user, for the treatment of Crohn’s disease, I explore how we understand the concept and experience of chronicity as it is represented in advertisements for Humira® and manifested in embodied reactions to these advertisements. Through a layered narrative method that combines rhetorical analysis with autoethnography, I analyze 13 Humira® commercials. I argue that Humira® commercials operate through a curative imaginary (Kafer, 2013), which not only assumes viewers desire to be immune-typical but also defines normative orientations to time. This case study reveals how direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising obscures cultural and systemic sources of (dis)ablism, including the ways striving for normalcy is in and of itself an experience of chronicity, and disregards experiences of chronicity that disrupt normalizing boundaries of time.