Search

Child mental health services are in rising demand, but increasingly overstretched and difficult for families to access. This article examines rhetorical techniques used by parents seeking a mental health diagnosis for their child. Using recordings of consultations from a child mental health clinic (UK) with 28 families, analysis focuses on the use of 'epistemic corroboration', a strategy by which third-party candidate diagnoses are reported to support the parents' case. That is, parents draw upon the expertise of non-present professional persons to strengthen their proposed diagnostic claims. Conversation analysis shows how this epistemic corroboration is reported by parents and received by mental health practitioners. Conclusions illustrate that mental health diagnosis for children is actively pursued by parents as they navigate labelling. This has implications for understanding the dilemmas created for families of possible medicalisation of their child to achieve the levels of support being sought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resources for arguing are examined in talk on 'talk radio', a cultural setting for which disputation is a routine activity. A contrastive device built to the format you say X, but what about Y is shown to be an important, recursively deployed linguistic resource for the accomplishment of such routine disputation. Aspects of the interactional work achieved with this device are discussed in relation to the setting-specific activity of 'arguing for arguing's sake', which is referred to as the pursuit of controversy. The device facilitates the construction by a contentious party of an argument out of the minor details of an opponent's account. It is seen that both hosts and callers in this setting orient to the efficaciousness of the format as a resource for doing argument. Episodes are also examined in which callers try to restrict the damage which hosts routinely seek to inflict on their claims through the use of the device. Keywords: argument, skepticism, mass media, public discourse, controversy, conversation analysis., Introduction Modern Anglo-American culture incorporates a variety of institutional settings for verbal interaction in which the practices of doubt and disputation are routinely relevant aspects of those settings' constituent discourse. [...]