Mired in Shadows: The U.S. Army’s Campaign to Encourage Mental Health Treatment

The United States Armed Forces have been in continuous conflicts since September 11, 2001. For the veterans returning from combat deployments, the human costs have been immense and long lasting. Each of the military departments has developed media campaigns to encourage mental health treatment. This essay introduces the rhetorical issues associated with mental disability as part of the broader genre of disability rhetorics. It then examines the media developed by the U.S. Army in its campaign to encourage mental health treatment by employing the schema of analysis developed by Sonja Foss and situating it within the works on visual rhetoric by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Kimberly Emmons, and Riki Thompson. The article next contextualizes the images used by the Army into the cultural environment faced by soldiers. Finally, it concludes that far from encouraging all soldiers to seek mental health treatment, the Army’s media campaign is stigmatizing the majority of those it seeks to assist.