Introduction

The editors’ introduction theorizes and operationalizes “interventions” in mental health rhetoric research while introducing the content and arguments of each chapter. Arguing that discourses on mental health crises emerge out of specific kairotics (such as the COVID-19 pandemic), the authors also posit that the complex themes and concerns that mental health rhetoric research illuminates span many epochs. Thus, “strategic interventions” are meant to challenge assumptions in existing literature and to offer readers a variety of ways that they might impact mental health realities in their own localities. This new collection fills gaps in current mental health rhetoric scholarship and contributes to the rhetoric of health and medicine, to rhetorical studies more generally, and to interdisciplinary research on mental health.