Books in the Lexington Studies in Health Communication series

This book explores the rural and urban healthcare environments that emerged in response to the HITECH Act of 2009. As it tracks the imminent challenges faced over the past ten years, this book sheds light on patterns of change that suggest healthcare transformations and electronic communication in the future.

Challenging Reproductive Control and Gendered Violence in the Americas: Intersectionality, Power, and Struggles for Rights utilizes an intersectional Chicana feminist approach to analyze reproductive and gendered violence against women in the Americas and the role of feminist activism through case studies including the current state of reproductive justice in Texas, feminicides in Latin America, raising awareness about Ni Una Ms and anti-feminicidal activism in Ciudad Jurez, and reproductive rights in Latin America amidst the Zika virus. Each of these contemporary contexts provides new insights into the relationships between and among feminist activism; reproductive health; the role of the state, local governments, health organizations, and the media; and the women of color who are affected by the interplay of these discourses, mandates, and activist efforts.

This book discusses existing problems with Black maternal health and the rhetorical implications of ethos in American society.

Mental Health among Higher Education Faculty, Administrators, and Graduate Students argues that mental illness stigma surrounds not being able to cope with the rigors of academia is viewed as personal weakness. It examines the complex mental health issues in higher education and offers best practices for institutions from a communication approach.

With an increasing number of individuals living with chronic illness and pain, integrative approaches offering self-management support are needed. This book proposes a multi-layered framework integrating the body/self/environment that cultivates wholeness as an authentic embodied presence in alignment with a reflexive self.

Engaging the reader with a variety of patient narratives and health communication scholarship, this book illustrates how narratives can create change; how differences matter; and how identity, relational, and cultural factors intersect to affect patienthood.

This book addresses different contexts of communication pertaining to non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI). An international group of clinicians and communication specialists describe, analyze, and explain how NSSI is communicated about, what NSSI is communicating, and how can we do a better job in communicating with others about NSSI.

Communication Studies and Feminist Perspectives on Ovarian Cancer examines the embodied experience of ovarian cancer by critically analyzing impacts of normative social and medical discoursesincluding discourses of risk, choice, early detection, lack of reliable screening tests for ovarian cancer, feminine beauty, and self-advocacyon women's communicative responses to the disease and treatments. It argues that these discourses help discredit some ovarian cancer experiences, encourage a one-dimensional perspective on the disease, and divert attention from larger issues such as society's disregard for women's complaints about disease symptoms. Blanket promotion of these discourses essentializes women's experiences of the disease, pointing out how normative beliefs about women's health and illness are often flipped and repackaged as standard language to discuss women's experiences.Using interview data and scholarly work from communication studies, feminist studies, critical/cultural studies, anthropology, critical psychology, and other disciplines, this book suggests we give equal importance to personal experiences and medical/scientific research to advance knowledge about ovarian cancer. Ovarian cancer is a disease specific to women; as such, women's experiences cannot be minimized in attempts to understand the disease.

This book explores the many ways that digital communication media, such as online forums, social networking sites, and mobile applications, enhance and constrain social support in health-related contexts.

This book explores how the realities of three young black women who have experienced eating disorders since childhood were transformed, discussing the larger implications of disordered eating in underrepresented populations. More broadly, this book discusses the need for culturally sensitive prevention, intervention, and care in mental health.

This book analyzes how women converse about breast cancer on the Internet. The author provides a discussion of the complex structures of online communities, particularly those focused on medical diagnoses.

This book analyzes mental health from a communicative perspective. Within this book, contributors consider mental health through various paradigmatic perspectives and contexts, such as education, media, and family, among other disciplines.

This book examines the mediated construction of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and its rise to public and political prominence by way of its direct connection with the NFL. More broadly, this book explores how this relationship situates in and through the sports/media complex.

Through narrative accounts, this book explores how women experience the health disruptions and illnesses that impact and often span their lives. The contributors examine how women's broader and ongoing life stories impact and are impacted by health disruptions and illnesses.

Engaging the reader with a variety of patient narratives and health communication scholarship, this book illustrates how narratives can create change; how differences matter; and how identity, relational, and cultural factors intersect to affect patienthood.

This book uses multiple methods to consider flaws in the current regulation of direct-to-consumer advertising, using Merck's launch of Gardasil as a primary case study. It offers a specific way forward for both regulators of Big Pharma as well as scholars of mass communication.

This book utilizes an intersectional feminist approach to analyze reproductive and gendered violence against women across the Americas with case studies focusing on the Zika virus, reproductive feminicides, and the role of feminist activism in organizing against violence.

This book takes a unique look at not only the presentation of disability in the media but also how image echoes impact individuals with disabilities and their identities and possible stigmatization. It provides an empirical analysis in the form of two case studies including primary research.

Through fourteen medical narratives of pediatric patients and their families, this book analyzes how one makes sense of difficult medical journeys.

This book provides an alternative to narratives that privilege the biomedical perspective on women's invisible illnesses. The contributors include women who exude diversity as it relates to race and ethnicity, career, religious experience, education, social support, and interpersonal relationships.