ABSTRACT
Domestic violence marks a medical situation where physical insult and mental illness have always intersected. We see rhetorical treatments of domestic violence as requiring further intervention in part because its discourses rely on the image of a stereotypical family that mirrors the television situation comedies of the 1950s and in part because the very discovery of domestic violence was itself a rhetorical maneuver. Any discussion of domestic violence and rhetoric must account for the tensions between the spoken and the unspoken as they relate to violent behavior between family members. Unspoken elements often include the cultural and intersectional construction of family relationships as well as unhelpful gender-based assumptions. We propose a heuristic and a narrative framework for developing and refining rhetorical interventions into mental health situations, based on an intersectional, culture-centered approach to health communication and domestic violence. Our approach may be adapted for further interventions in mental health rhetoric research, rhetoric of health and medicine, and healthcare communication.
