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Through a historical case study of the mental health community website HealthyPlace.com , the author applies social semiotics and critical discourse analysis to interrogate the visual discourse surrounding mental health online. Web design transformations over the course of a decade demonstrate how visual imagery conveys a shift from a biomedical discourse focused on illness to a social-therapeutic discourse centered on health and wellness. Ultimately, the author argues that the utilization of faces in stock photography, stylized images, and social media platforms on HealthyPlace reflects a growing trend in virtual visual synthetic personalization on the internet to market mental health disorders as a concern for the everyday person while selling the promise of wellness through online participation. This article explores the visual language of mental health and wellness online to expanding on research in the field of visual communication, health communication, and new media studies.

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A B S T R A C T Poetry matters: a case for poetry in social workThis article seeks to contribute to an unfortunate decline in literature that explores the importance of the arts and humanities to social work practice, education and research through an exploration of the role of poetry in social work. The authors explore the metaphor of the poet/practitioner, identifying what practitioners can learn from the poet. Second, the authors explore the use of poetry in therapeutic settings, identifying the strengths of using this tool in clinical practice. Third, the authors address the use of poetry within the context of research, exploring how the research poem can be used as a tool of post-modern qualitative research to help social workers understand the lived experiences of their clients. Finally, the authors explore current and future consequences of the profession ignoring the arts and humanities.

The turn to narrative as a form of therapy has become a common practice with individuals telling their stories in private and public forums in hopes of finding healing and recovery for a wide variety of mental health disorders. With the emergence of the internet and the proliferation of new media forms, narrative practices have evolved concurrently. An examination of the digitally mediated narratives I call e-stories, on mental health community websites can provide a window into how people use psychological concepts in narratives to do mental health work in everyday life (Edwards & Potter, 1992). This case study of the HealthyPlace online journal community shows how e-stories play a significant role in self-identity construction and ideological reproductive work in relation to mental illness and recovery. This research examines autobiographical introductions posted on twenty-eight journal homepages to explore how everyday people use psychotherapeutic coherence systems — lay versions of expert knowledge — to demonstrate expertise and authority while organizing experiences into a socially sharable narrative, characterizing self-identity in terms of illness and health simultaneously. These e-stories reveal the power of language to serve as a tool to negotiate community membership, reproduce ideologies about mental health and recovery, and employ narrative devices online to represent self-identities of people as “screwed up, but working on it.”