Based on an ongoing collaboration between composition specialists and mental health practitioners, this book presents research of value not only to writing scholars and teachers, but also to professional clinicians, their teachers, and those who use mental health records in making critically important decisions. It also offers a model that other scholars may find useful when doing similar long-range studies of other writing-intensive professions.

By analyzing the rhetoric of mental health records, this updated second edition contributes to the growing body of research in rhetoric and composition studies on the nature of writing and reading in professional discourse communities.

Throughout their analysis, the authors argue that mental health records are much more than recordings of clinical information about patients, that they are socially constructed documents, whose writers and readers are profoundly affected by complex forces of which they are largely unaware.