The Texas State Board of Education has approved required Bible readings for Texas public schools. Which Bible passages are chosen may be as important as whether the Bible is included at all. In some versions, Eve is Adam's "helper"; in others, she is his "partner." Link below.

What seems central may prove incidental. What appears peripheral may later prove essential. Meanwhile institutions cannot wait for perfect understanding. The challenge is to build systems that do not entrap us by treating our capacity for change as a problem to be solved rather than a strength.

The question is not only whether a diagnosis is correct, but how it becomes evidence for itself. Once uncertainty is translated into authority, how do we find our way back to competing interpretations? Sooner or later, every field revises something it once considered settled.

This is our why. With the opening of the Barack Obama Presidential Center, @barackobama.bsky.social's 2009 remarks ring true today: Generations of LGBTQ+ people are counting on us to fight for our rights and freedoms. We are stronger than the challenges we face. Let’s keep moving forward.

Some errors are easy to identify because they leave contradictory evidence. But what happens when an error influences the very evidence later used to evaluate it? Does that make the possibility for correction even harder?

A diagnosis can shape records, treatment, and interpretation. If the diagnosis was wrong, how would we know? And if we wouldn’t know, how many such errors remain invisible?

Some of the most important conversations in my work emerged in reaching beyond my home discipline. Questions about diagnosis led me into medical humanities, STS, philosophy, and literary studies. I'm grateful they did.

AI is forcing scholars to take a close look at reading. How has writing always been a technology? How does technology guide what and how we read? How are we contributing to novel forms and structures? And what new methods of reading might emerge in response? m.youtube.com/watch?v=N4PT...

What an interesting lecture by @gracelockrobin.bsky.social today at our Women in Philosophy group! Here is the recording: youtu.be/tUUk5MLJvrA #philsky #eudsky #P4C #ethics Thanks @triphilosophy.bsky.social for supporting this lecture series.

In mental health care, we're increasingly asked to measure: symptoms, outcomes, engagement, even the therapeutic relationship itself. Measurement has its place. But some things are valuable because they exceed our ability to measure them. www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWo7...

I have no doubt this is what Luhrmann observed. I've seen it in practice. Great book, btw. My only question for the profession: can many different lives really share a common label without losing something important?

I’m glad to share that my paper presentation will be published in Southwest Philosophical Studies, Volume 48, the online and open-access journal of the 2026 New Mexico Texas (NMTX) Philosophical Society. More when it’s available.

We see from different perspectives: outside and within, sometimes both at once. Yet we often treat one way of knowing as more reliable, more in touch with the objective outside, which itself is never fully free from bias. This shapes who gets to define what is truly real and what carries authority.

"AI Chatbot at Character.AI falsely claimed to be licensed in Pennsylvania and gave a fake Pennsylvania license number while holding itself out to be a licensed psychiatrist."

I’ve been sitting with this, trying to understand the new tool. There’s a real problem here: starting from scratch, retelling your story, losing context. But carrying your story forward depends on what gets captured. Over time, visits and records do more than preserve a story, they shape it.

In EMDR, we learn: when we see the bear, we move first. Meaning comes later. Add this: feeling, too, is part of that “later.” What something is (fear, danger, threat) gets assigned after—shaped by the categories we carry. A quiet challenge to the classical view, with implications for health.

AI scribes can reduce administrative burden when used at a basic level. Ambient systems capture the full transcript, then select and organize what’s discussed into structured outputs. For anything to become an output, ambiguity has to be resolved.

Some people look as though they have a psychiatric condition, with hallucinations and delusions, but are actually experiencing an autoimmune illness. The divide is less stark than previously realized, and now physicians are working to bring neurological treatments to psychiatry.

AI “scribes” can work well when they keep notes general and reduce detail overload.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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

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-...

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 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 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.