Classified Conversations: Psychiatry and Tactical Technical Communication in Online Spaces Drew Holladay University of Louisville ABSTRACT This article examines the practices of writers in online discussion board conversations as they interpret technical documents related to a psychiatric diagnosis. Drawing from interviews with 15 participants, the author argues that writers in this context interpret and manipulate medical knowledge in unique ways that benefit the community. The author concludes that studies in technical communication should take into account all groups affected by specialized knowledge, including those with little expertise or social power. KEYWORDS Medical documents; online communication; psychiatry and psychology; reception studies; rhetoric of health and medicine Introduction In his Technical Communication Quarterly (TCQ) article introducing the concept of “tactical technical communication,” Miles Kimball (2006) writes that the field’ s “focus on the organization has kept us from appreciating the growing amount of technical communication produced outside of (or in spite of) organizations” (p. 68). Although research in technical communication often centers on the “strategic” work of institutions, Kimball exhorts us to “ask not just how to improve technical communication, but what technical communication and other technologies mean to users culturally, as well as how user-producers make further meaning through these cultural materials” (p. 84). Taking up this orientation to users and their cultures, in this article I examine the practices of participants in online mental health discussion forums conversations as they interpret technical docu- ments, including American psychiatry’s “charter document,” the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Participants in the forums I have chosen to study have received, or identify with, a particular psychiatric diagnosis; those included in this study have written in forums dedicated to either autism spectrum disorders (ASD) or post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD). This communal identification, along with each venue’s relative privacy, leads to candid conversations about experiences with social and psychological distress, behavioral differences, and medical interventions. Users in these forums are extra- and intrainstitutional actors: they discuss documents like the DSM outside of its official applications but are also subject to the decisions and descriptions of mental health professionals and thoroughly enmeshed within institutional practices. The actions of these mental health forum participants, however, may be invisible to relevant institu- tions and organizations that act in “strategies” rather than tactics. As Michel de Certeau (1984) distinguishes, institutions enact strategies that impose order or conformity. The institution and its representatives may fail to notice, or consciously disregard, the actions of people under their direction, like the shop manager who ignores a worker “borrowing” company tools for personal purposes (p. 25). However, “tactics” put into use by the worker, the consumer, the subject, or the medical patient can reveal a strategy’s limits: tactics “show the extent to which intelligence [i.e., knowledge] is inseparable from the everyday struggles and pleasures that it articulates” (de Certeau, 1984, p. xx). Although they are described by documents like the DSM, the discussion forum participants in this article reveal “everyday CONTACT Drew Holladay drew.holladay@louisville.edu Department of English, University of Louisville, 315 Bingham Humanities, Louisville, KY 40292. © 2017 Association of Teachers of Technical Writing TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY 2017, VOL. 26, NO. 1, 8–24 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10572252.2016.1257744 Downloaded by [University of Maryland Baltimore County] at 08:29 25 August 2017