Classified Conversations: Psychiatry and Tactical Technical Communication in Online Spaces

ABSTRACT

This article examines the practices of writers in online discussion board conversations as they interpret technical documents related to a psychiatric diagnosis. Drawing from interviews with 15 participants, the author argues that writers in this context interpret and manipulate medical knowledge in unique ways that benefit the community. The author concludes that studies in technical communication should take into account all groups affected by specialized knowledge, including those with little expertise or social power.

KEYWORDS:

• Medical documents
• online communication
• psychiatry and psychology
• reception studies
• rhetoric of health and medicine

Notes

1. Notable exceptions include (Duffy & Yergeau, 2011; Heilker & King, 2010; Heilker & Yergeau, 2011; Jack, 2014; and Molloy, 2015); Prendergrast, 2001; Price, 2011; Yergeau, 2013).

2. Many mental health forums discourage or ban research of any kind from being performed on the site and were therefore not used in this project.

3. The nonhierarchical social situation is similar to other types of special interest or support groups, such as Emily Martin’s (2007) accounts of bipolar disorder group meetings.

4. For an insightful description of this trend, see Stevenson, Harp, and Gernsbacher (2011).

5. Other diagnoses or conditions beyond one’s “main” diagnosis, as when an autistic person also experiences depression.

6. I am not implying that the autism community is homogenous; in fact, writers in the community often point to its broad diversity of personalities, opinions, and idiosyncratic traits. Self-advocacy groups and self-advocates, however, tend to shun the pathologization of autism in medicine and psychiatry.

7. ASAN “seeks to advance the principles of the disability rights movement with regard to autism … and seek[s] to organize the Autistic community to ensure our voices are heard in the national conversation about us” (Autistic Self Advocacy Network [2016], para. 1). By framing their movement as a matter of rights, self-advocates with autism invoke a history of emancipatory political actions to end institutionalized discrimination.

8. Writer and autistic self-advocate John Elder Robison served within Autism Speaks for a time, but resigned his position in 2013 due to the organization’s continued use of “autism epidemic” rhetoric to promote its work.

9. From an activity theory perspective, Russell (1997) and Spinuzzi (2003) refer to many forms and objects, and specifically genres, as “tools-in-use.” My phrase here is more limited in scope.

10. As Johnson (2010) and Molloy (2015) attest, people with a psychiatric diagnosis are often distrusted, disbelieved, and dismissed as incompetent.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Drew Holladay

Drew Holladay is a Ph.D. candidate in rhetoric and composition at the University of Louisville. His research combines rhetorical theory, sociolinguistics, and critical disability studies to examine writing about medicine and mental health.