Recuperative Ethos and Agile Epistemologies: Toward a Vernacular Engagement with Mental Illness Ontologies

Abstract

This essay uses data from a field-based study to describe the everyday rhetorical performances through which ethos is established when the orator’s credibility has been compromised by stigma born of chronic mental illness. These strategies, called “recuperative ethos,” include displays of astuteness, references to strong human connections, and appeals to religious topoi. Further, the essay describes innovative rhetorical performances, called “agile epistemologies,” which include logical contradiction, metonymic parallels, enthymemes, and expansive views on human agency. Taken together, these terms use the voices and experiences of mentally ill participants to add important insight into the rhetoric of mental healthcare and the rhetoric of medicine, health, and wellness.

Acknowledgments

I thank Libby Miles, Kim Hensley-Owens, Bob Schwegler, and RSQ reviewers for their feedback on this work. I am also grateful for the tremendous helpfulness of the editor and his staff.

Notes

¹  Pescosolido and colleagues also explain that those working in public health have a vested interest in ending stigma since it leads to fewer individuals with mental illnesses seeking care.

²  Self-stigma refers to conditions in which a member of a stigmatized group is “aware of” and “agrees with” negative stereotypes (Mittal et al. 974).

³  Catherine Prendergast aptly describes this tension when she points out that her acknowledgment of schizophrenia as a brain disease puts her “on a collision course with many of [her] colleagues with whom [she] generally shares … a number of basic epistemological assumptions” as she, too, has “generally poststructuralist leanings,” which make her admissions that schizophrenia is a disease “sound at best conservative and at worst theoretically unsound” (46).

⁴  In many ways, my project resembles what others have called “rhetorical ethnography” (Cintron; Conquergood; Sangren). These studies, explains Ralph Cintron, rely on the fact “that rhetorical analysis can help make sense of everyday language use,” and that “rhetorical analysis need not be about famous speeches and/or the written word. Indeed, it need not be about the discursive at all and should also include the non-discursive and performative” (“Gates Locked” 5). These studies are valuable since rhetorical ethnography is often on a “collision course search for outlandish data that unsettle familiar truths” (Conquergood 81). Ethnographic recounting, too, “can produce rich stories of lived bodies in which medicine figures as a part of daily life” and this kind of storytelling often involves “jagged story-lines … told by a variety of narrators whose voices may be drawn together and/or clash” (Mol and Law 58). I, thus, call the project “partly ethnographic” as Mol has described her own research (“Pathology” 82). Like Mol’s work, what follows is “a hybrid genre;” it mixes “the philosophical aim of crafting theoretical terms with the practiographical style of telling stories” (Mol “Pathology” 84).

⁵  Recruitment mechanisms and data collection procedures were designed in consult with the clubhouse director and the IRB as noninvasive as possible and as mostly observational—both of which are hallmarks of naturalistic inquiry. The project went through full board review in July of 2010 and was approved after revisions on August 5, 2010 prior to data collection (study number 178158-2).

⁶  In fact, in my approved IRB application, I had indicated that I would be willing to “confer with clinical staff” if I was concerned about a participant’s ability to offer informed consent on her or his own behalf, and I did just that. Moreover, I followed participant recruitment protocol when I believed a potential participant could be harmed through the observation. Inevitably, though, I was privy to these persons’ everyday language use, and it was quite rich. I was, therefore, sorry to exclude it from the data.

⁷  Recuperative ethos might resemble other populations’ ethos-establishing appeals.

⁸  Even though they might be traceable in other populations.

⁹  With the affordances opened up by these re-readings of rhetorical ethos and how it might be understood in contemporary contexts, Michael Hyde, for instance, in Ethos of Rhetoric, makes a convincing case for a recovering the pre-Aristotelian sense of ethos as dwelling place. Lisa Keranen examines ethos in the context of scientists whose credibility has been compromised and how they attempt to recover ethos via the strategic use of voice in the construction of persona. Martha Cheng examines the construction of ethos in an online educational chat; she concludes, “Through strategic positioning, evaluations, and stylistic choices, speakers portrayed their positive behavior, revealed personal values, and demonstrated individuality” (223). Cheng asserts that her participants were able to “strengthen their ethos by demonstrating qualities such as knowledge, competence, and authority appropriate to their profession” (223).

¹⁰  For instance, in relation to how physicians and psychiatrists are trained to gain compliance from patients, Judy Segal explains that what at first glance appears to be an appeal to pathos is actually an appeal to ethos. Thus, if a patient suffers from issues related to obesity, a physician might try to identify with that patient by sharing a tendency to overeat, and then to follow it up with an indication that they overcome that tendency. For Segal, this scripted method “trades on” rather than “recalibrates” power dynamics between physicians and patients; thus, physician engage “not in empathy but in moralism” (Health 137). Among her definitions, Segal defines ethos as the “persuasiveness of the physician” (Health 152). I build on this work by suggestion the everyday ways in which a patient becomes persuasive or not via recuperative ethos and agile epistemologies.

¹¹  This is not to say that other populations do not use these tactics, but to say that the mental “illnesses” with which participants suffer might also generate rhetorical resources.

¹²  Although the term “neurodiversity” is most frequently used to describe neurological attributes of those suffering from disorders on the autism spectrum (see, e.g., the work of Ann Jurecic), it has also been used to describe the linguistic and cognitive affordances of those with other mental disorders and mental illnesses.

¹³  In order to protect anonymity, this community college name is fictional.

¹⁴  Many participants discussed the loved ones they have lost following acute illness experiences as well as following their diagnosis.

¹⁵  I have changed the name of the local psychiatric hospital to a fictional one in order to maintain participants’ anonymity.

¹⁶  In many ways, these forms of recuperative ethos resemble eunoia or goodwill as it is described in Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Shakita shared even more compelling references to her exceptional abilities to be moral and empathetic, but these were exceedingly private things she chose to disclose that she explicitly asked me not to share with readers or anyone else.

¹⁷  Clubhouse members, of course, must have formal diagnoses of chronic mental illnesses to qualify for services.

¹⁸  For a thorough articulation of these, see Pryal’s 2010 RSQ essay and Stephanie Stone Horton’s 2013 collection Affective Disorders and the Writing Life.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cathryn Molloy

Cathryn Molloy is Assistant Professor in the School of Writing, Rhetoric & Technical Communication at James Madison University, MSC 2103, 54 Bluestone Dr., Harrison Hall, Harrisonburg, VA 22807, USA.