Preparing for Mental Health Crises Together: Structuring Equitable Deliberations in the Onondaga Community Trauma Task Force

Lenny Grant

In this presentation a participant researcher reports on an ongoing community-based effort to assess Onondaga County, New York’s preparedness to treat the mental health needs of victims of future mass traumatic events. To work through historical inter-group tensions, Onondaga Community Trauma Task Force (OCTTF) uses Nominal Group Technique (NGT) to structure equitable dialogues and deliberations among diverse stakeholders (indigenous peoples, neighborhood groups, nonprofit agencies, first responders). The presentation argues that, as a rhetorical tool, NGT has helped give voice to historically traumatized and underserved communities whose cultures are typically disregarded in large-scale emergency management planning.

NGT was developed in the mid-20th century as a strategy for collaborative problem solving that resists groupthink and asymmetrical power dynamics. The rhetorical strength of NGT is in its procedure: each group member writes down her solutions or ideas, the solutions are discussed without knowledge of their author, then similar ideas are merged and ranked according to their problem-solving potential.

Although NGT originally was used in business and creative contexts, it is experiencing a new surge of interest among healing professionals (nurses, psychologists, and social workers) who use it to ensure community that voices are included in public health decision making. Using the OCTTF as case study-in-progress, this presentation preliminarily confirms their findings.

In reporting on OCTTF and NGT, this presentation aims to contribute to two existing conversations in the broader field rhetorical studies. Firstly, since the social turn in composition/rhetoric, community-engaged scholars have continually sought and developed context-specific means of fostering equitable dialogues and social outcomes (Flower 2008, Blythe et al. 2008, Rowan & Cavallaro 2018). In response, this presentation offers NGT as a replicable and context-independent model for creating meaningful community exchanges, making it an efficient and tactical (Mathieu 2005) procedural rhetoric for solving community problems justly.

Secondly, this presentation is a response to recent calls in medical rhetoric for engaged scholarship in that emergent field (Scott & Meloncon 2018). It unapologetically calls for rhetoricians of health and medicine to engage in advocacy research (Lifton 1972) with and within the communities whom are the subjects of their research.

Finally, the presentation concludes with pedagogical insights gleaned from NGT and OCTTF. Among them is how a technical communication class used data created during the NGT process to write feasibility reports, which were then presented to the community.

Rhetoric and Aesthetics in Narrative Medicine and Health Humanities: A Course in Writing in the Health Sciences as Case Study

Jarron Slater

This presentation applies Kenneth Burke’s theory of form as the creating and fulfilling of desires and expectations to narrative medicine. I want to show symposium participants how they can use these theories in a course on writing in the health sciences. The theory of form is crucial in rhetorical theory because it shows how rhetoric cannot be separated from aesthetic. Stories influence people to attitudes, and attitudes are incipient acts. Narrative medicine involves being moved by the stories of illness, while health humanities enable professionals to increase their capacity for empathy. All of these are crucial skills for professionals to learn. Narrative medicine can also help technical communicators improve their communication because it teaches empathy.

This presentation provides pedagogical techniques for including a narrative medicine unit in a health writing course. Students study texts in the health and medical humanities, and they study, write, and analyze poetry, drama, and non-fiction texts on health-related issues. Students write a pathography, or illness narrative, and then perform it as part of a progymnasmata. These exercises prepare students for more technical and professionally-based genres, such as SOAP notes and literature reviews, because students have practice thinking about and writing to specific audiences.

Autoagonistics: Convincing Ourselves

Brian Jackson

Self-persuasion‚ or as Jean Nienkamp calls it, "internal rhetoric"‚ is an undertheorized phenomenon outside social psychology circles, where it is likely tied up in the debate about justification and cognitive dissonance. Where do we stand on the whole self-persuasion thing? And where do we find self-persuasion in action? I'll argue that one of the most prominent self-persuasion regimes can be found in cognitive behavioral therapy. In this presentation, I suggest that cognitive therapy, as theorized by Aaron Beck in his 1976 book "Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders," presents a fascinating take on self-persuasion as a rhetorical art of what I'm calling "autoagonistics," or self-debate.

I'd argue that there's no more popular applied rhetoric for emotional disorders of all kinds than cognitive therapy (CT). But let's look carefully at CT's assumptions about reason to see how it presents a theory of self-persuasion that depends for its (therapeutic) force on what Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca call the "universal audience"‚ the type of audience convinced by the rhetoricality of fact. In CT practice, the self presents it-self with ostensibly unassailable reasons for abandoning the maladaptive automatic self-discourse that causes emotional distress. This practice assumes (1) we can partition ourselves into warring rhetorical factions in autoagonistic warfare, and (2) a more wise, educated, CT-trained self can marshal compelling reasons‚ what Laura Daston has called the "mercenary soldiers of argument"‚ in defense. A more careful look at CT as rhetorical theory, via a close reading of Beck's "Cognitive Therapy," may help us develop a more sophisticated understanding of the way reason works in the constituting of rhetorical subjects, plural, latent in each of us. It may also help us to advance the rhetorical concept of self-persuasion that, though intellectually tantalizing, has been dormant for decades.