Monica Ross

Diagnostic overshadowing: cognitive bias in clinical diagnosis.

Once a person carries a diagnosis, clinicians may attribute new symptoms to the same label rather than reassessing. But reassessment itself occurs within diagnostic frameworks that both guide and limit clinical interpretation.

Thinking about how clinical interpretations travel once they enter digital health infrastructures.

Before anything diagnostic circulates, it must be recorded. Before it is recorded, it must be captured and interpreted. Once documented, clinical interpretations enter infrastructures that stabilize them as durable facts, long after the conditions that produced them have receded from view.

Not autopathography.
Autotheory: lived experience used to examine the systems that tried to name it.

Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power since 1500 Explore how technical and social structures co-evolved over five centuries in this large-scale research visualization.

calculatingempires.net?pos=18146.42...

Ruha Benjamin reminds us that to focus on “exclusion,” the default solution becomes “inclusion”—without asking what we’re being folded into. The point isn’t simply to enter the room. It’s to change what the room makes possible. Vernā Myers—Not just invited to the party, but asked to dance.

Looking forward to presenting this spring at the NMTX Philosophical Society 76th Annual Meeting and the 2026 Health Humanities Consortium, continuing work at the intersection of philosophy, clinical practice, and the humanities.

Data requires interpretation.
Correlation ≠ causation.
Evidence shifts with context.
Lack of a cause does not make an experience less real.
But once defined, a category becomes required.
It takes on a life of its own. It demands more proof.
My critique is of systems, not the people navigating them.

Aerial photograph of Radboud University campus with the Erasmus tower in the foreground: tallest building in Nijmegen & home to the Futures of Language project. Source: RU

We're hiring! Join us to work at the intersection of social interaction and language technology. Postdoc and PhD positions in my Futures of Language research group, based at Radboud University in Nijmegen, NL

Read more: markdingemanse.net/futures/news...

#linguistics #interaction #sts #emca #hci

YouTube video by Sverker Sikström AI Interviews Outperform Standard Mental Health Rating Scales

AI can’t legally diagnose in the U.S. But in Sweden, research tools can now conduct full clinical interviews and hand clinicians a ready-made interpretation. www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaU7...

It's the little things, the little bits of humor, when combing through journal article after journal article.

STAR, S. L. (1999). The Ethnography of Infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist, 43(3), 377-391. doi.org/10.1177/0002... (Original work published 1999)

Grateful to share a brief update: I’ve been accepted as a visiting scholar in the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society at UC Berkeley 2026-2027.

I’ll have an academic affiliation while continuing work on diagnostic language, narrative authority, and their ethical afterlives.

When A Name Replaces The Story Monica Ross uses her personal and clinical experience to explore how diagnostic language can clarify, constrain, and quietly shape the meaning of a life.

New piece out today on The Polyphony. It looks at how diagnostic labels take on narrative power they were never built to hold—and how people find their way back to themselves.
thepolyphony.org/2026/01/28/w...

Capture: in research, to gather stories.
In culture, dominant storylines.
In tech, data extraction.

I call it diagnostic capture: when a diagnostic label shapes the meaning of an event, not the identity of a person.

It’s about interpretive dominance, not stigma or devaluation.

Delaware House bars AI and other nonhuman entities from holding clinical licenses House Bill 191 passed the Delaware House on Jan. 20, 2026. The bill clarifies that nonhuman entities, including AI, cannot be licensed as nurses, physicians or physician assistants and cannot use protected clinical titles; sponsors said it preserves accountability while allowing research and decision‑support tools.

Delaware takes a bold step to safeguard patient care by passing a bill that bars AI and other nonhuman entities from holding clinical licenses or using protected healthcare titles.

Learn more here

#DE #AIEthics #CitizenPortal #HealthCareRegulation #PatientSafety

A diagnosis can offer language, structure, and belonging—and that can matter deeply. But diagnoses are also limited tools shaped by institutions, culture, and history. Naming its limits is about widening the frame, not closing it.

Not trauma memoir.
Not recovery narrative.
Not anti-psychiatry polemic.

Not abstract philosophy.

Critical narrative work with next piece forthcoming in The Polyphony.

The language of illness shifts responsibility
away from systems
and onto individuals

as if individuals were not living inside
the very structures
that shape their lives

Person seated on a couch reading a book with a tote bag from the Colgate Writers Conference, another individual in the background using a laptop, in a room with soft lighting.

The 2026 Colgate Writers Conference will take place June 7–13.

With expanded workshop offerings designed to support both emerging and established writers, as well as enhanced scholarship opportunities, the 2025 conference drew writers from more than 20 states and three countries.

bit.ly/4stmUkF

Med Hums 101: What is Medical Humanities? The Polyphony is delighted to launch the publication of a new brochure – MedHums 101: What is medical humanities?

🚀 Delighted to announce the publication of our new #MedHums101 brochure: ‘What is Medical Humanities?’ We hope it sparks your imagination, inspires your curiosity & encourages you to engage in our vibrant interdisciplinary field! tinyurl.com/what-is-med-...

Diagnosis is unstable. Institutions pursue stability because it is administratively useful. When unstable human experience is forced into stable categories, people adapt to survive. The costs increase when labels carry stigma, are treated as final, and systems resist acknowledging error.

For a time, my life intersected with a sociologist. Thirty years a professor. Critical theory: Marcuse. Alice’s Restaurant each Thanksgiving on San Diego radio. “You can get…” Eagleton, Jameson, Baudrillard, Berger. Postmodern theory in the air, in the arts. Today the meta-. Aware, reaching anyway.

The “Clinical Ceiling” Blocking Lived Experience Leadership in Mental Health Lived experience executives describe a “clinical ceiling” that confines peer roles to the margins while hospitals and services preserve traditional chains of command.

The “Clinical Ceiling” Blocking Lived Experience Leadership

Lived experience workers describe a “clinical ceiling” that confines peer roles to the margins while hospitals and services preserve traditional chains of command

By Kelli Grant

www.madinamerica.com/2025/12/the-...

6 Suggestions for DSM-6 Making the next DSM look less like a house of mirrors

6 Suggestions for DSM-6

Making the next DSM look less like a house of mirrors

www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/6-suggesti...

Design thinking starts with empathy.
Empathy isn’t sympathy, pity, or even sincere concern.
It’s curiosity.
It’s the practice of stepping into another’s shoes.

Clinicians know this tension well.
You can recognize that a diagnosis is provisional and still be required to treat it as stable.
That gap between what you know and what the system demands is not a personal failure.
It is a structural problem we have not named clearly enough.

Not everything that resists classification is awaiting a better name. Some experiences are asking for care without capture. #CriticalPsychiatry
#EthicsOfCare

Hi Kim! Thanks for reaching out. I’m not taking on projects of this kind, but I appreciate the note.

For the misnamed Through the gloss of commercial glass, winter light flared against the Sierra Nevada ridges above Lake Tahoe. We had moved so I could begin a postdoctoral fellowship in social work. Starting over duri...

The essay is live here now at The Lancet Psychiatry www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...
#MedicalHumanities
#CriticalPsychiatry
#Bioethics

St. Edward’s University, Austin, 2013.
A counseling psych MA program.
Prof: “There’s nothing wrong with you.”
A little over a decade later: For the Misnamed.
A call to restore the narrative.