Moving Closer: Speakers with Mental Disabilities, Deep Disclosure, and Agency through Vulnerability

Abstract

This essay examines the rhetoric of an organized group of mentally disabled speakers who share their stories with the public to fight the stigma that adheres to psychiatric diagnoses. Their “deep disclosure” of the sometimes disturbing details of their disability-related experiences can make the speakers and their audience members vulnerable in distinct ways. Vulnerability in these rhetorical situations need not only be viewed as threatening, however. Rather, the essay argues, it has the potential to be highly productive when it encourages the speaker and audience member’s openness to each other’s influence.

Notes

1 I thank RR reviewers Julie Jung and Jay Dolmage for their instrumental feedback on earlier versions of this essay.

2 I use the term “mental disability” in keeping with the terminology favored by theorists in disability studies. The term “mental illness” appears in quotations of Speakers Bureau members, however, as the members I worked with all chose that term to refer to their psychiatrically diagnosed conditions.

3 Through much of this essay, I refer to the purposes and thinking of members of the Speakers Bureau using the pronoun “we.” While the group of six people (myself included) whose rhetorical product and motivations I studied closely do not in any way form a monolith in terms of identity, I did notice enough similarities in our experiences as rhetors operating under the constraints of stigma to make me feel comfortable using that pronoun. In other ways, outside of rhetorical production, Speakers Bureau members differ significantly from each other. For example, some members consider mental disability a brain disease while others see it as simply a place on a wide-ranging spectrum of being human.

4 In my IRB-approved investigation of the work of the Speakers Bureau, I taped and analyzed members’ speeches, interviewed them afterwards about the experience of speaking, and had them perform a rhetorical analysis of transcripts of their own presentations. I received their permission to use the gathered data for my research so long as I maintained their anonymity by using pseudonyms and altered any details that might make the participants identifiable. I sought the data to investigate the ways in which one group of individuals with mental disabilities make rhetorical choices in their efforts to fight stigma.

5 Speakers Bureau members are aware that several students in any given audience may be mentally disabled or may know friends or family members with experiences similar to those of the speakers. Even in these instances, our goal remains the de-stigmatization of mental disability, as stigma can still affect the self-perceptions of those with lived experience.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

N. Renuka Uthappa

N. Renuka Uthappa is a doctoral student at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Her scholarly interests include rhetorics of madness, disability rhetorics, and activist research. For the final piece of her research with the Speakers Bureau, she conducted a collaborative stigma-fighting workshop with some of its members. She will present the results of this workshop at the 2017 CCCC convention. She can be contacted at [email protected].