The first-ever thorough exploration and discussion of the rhetorical model of social invention [RSI] (initially conceived by rhetorical theorist William R. Brown) for today's students and scholars.

Fourth and final in a series of essays (see Brown, 1978, 1982, 1986) treating communication as driver of history, this piece argues for the symbolic constitution of need, showing also its systemic role in power relationships and in ideology with reference to American minority-majority communication. The essay (1) develops a communication-based rationale for "need" as an entry point for rhetorical intervention, with "need" viewed as being both subordinate and superordinate to "attention" and "power," (2) historically illustrates "need" as a dynamic for rhetorical intervention into communication between whites and African Americans, and (3) demonstrates via a case study specifically the strategies, tactics, and maneuvers of "need"-based rhetorical intervention into majority-minority communication. The essay concludes with a review of the implications of need mediation for power and ideological interventions and suggests research directions to students, scholars and practitioners of cultural change. Overall, the essay highlights the subsystem of need, which interacts interdependently with the subsystems of attention (Brown, 1982) and power (Brown, 1986) to form the Rhetoric of Social Intervention model (Brown, 1978). (Contains 1 figure and 13 notes.).

Offering rhetorically informed strategic interventions, this innovative collection moves beyond critiques of mental health issues, problems, and care. With sections that focus on methodological, cultural and legal, and pedagogical interventions, readers will find an engaging discussion of a discrete mental health phenomenon as well as a clear interventional takeaway in each chapter. Contributors make use of critical discourse analyses, ethnographic inquiries, autoethnographic inquiries, case studies, and textual analyses to engage such mental health research topics as postpartum depression among Chinese mothers; insanity pleas; anosognosia; issues of intimacy, access, and embodiment in research projects; community support groups; Black mental health; women in Alcoholics Anonymous; and mental health in faculty workshops and university online health tools. The authors and editors create scholarship on mental health that explicitly builds productive methodological, theoretical, and practical bridges among scholars and teachers in the various specialties of writing and communication. This collection will interest scholars, students, and practitioners in health and medical humanities; rhetoric of health and medicine; health communication; medical anthropology; scientific and technical communication; disability studies; and rhetorical studies generally.