It was really nice to be back on the TXST campus. As an undergrad, I took a course in the philosophy department there.
Grateful for the connections and the conversations. A thoughtful group, asking many of the same questions about the influence of new technologies.
Human-coded sessions become training data, then metrics, and begin to define what counts as “good therapy” at scale.
Not just what we do, but how we read what’s happening.
$20/hour to code therapy sessions.
www.lyssn.io/about-us/car...
This also makes me think about what happens after the loop, when those patterns get recorded and reused and start shaping what counts as evidence going forward.
Grateful to be presenting at NMTX Philosophical Society’s 76th annual meeting this week.
Also feeling affirmed in placing this work across English, health humanities, and philosophy—each asking something different of the same questions.
Looking ahead to Berkeley and OHST.
Two weeks. Back to back presentations.
Not just on diagnosis—
but on what happens after an interpretation is made.
When it sticks.
When it circulates.
When it begins to organize what can be seen.
I’ve talked about mislabeling. It’s also about how the conditions for what counts as understandable get set in advance.
Formalization becomes risky when uncertain interpretations start to harden into systems that treat them as settled knowledge.
Screenshot of text arguing that the safety of AI therapy depends on the architecture built around the model, including clinical reasoning layers and safety constraints.
The framing is revealing. This is some of what I’m tracking.
When care becomes “architecture,” clinical reasoning becomes a layer, safety a constraint, and therapy a protocol.
But mental health care is interpretive work.
The risk isn’t AI.
It’s designing care around what systems can formalize.
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.
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
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.
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 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
🚀 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-...
