How do interpretations change as they become institutional records?
Shadow of a Diagnosis
When Interpretation Becomes Infrastructure
Monica A. Ross, DSW, LPCC Visiting Scholar, UC Berkeley
Drawing on the humanities and science and technology studies, this project examines how psychiatric interpretations move from clinical encounters into contemporary digital systems, where they shape subsequent self-understanding, institutional understanding, and decision-making. It asks how clinical practice can preserve context and promote agency.
Monica Ross is a psychotherapist, author, and Visiting Scholar with UC Berkeley’s Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society and the Office for the History of Science and Technology. Her clinical experience informs the project’s attention to how psychiatric knowledge is interpreted, documented, and carried into subsequent institutional decisions and understandings of the self.
Practice foundation
Grounded in clinical and organizational practice
This research grows from work across community health, integrated care, employee assistance, telehealth, digital mental health, and technology organizations.
Kaiser PermanenteIntegrated healthcare
headspaceDigital mental health & EAP
Texas DFPSPublic human services
ORACLE TALEOEnterprise technology
Community-based clinical care across FQHCs, community clinics, telehealth, and private practice.
Selected employment and contract experience. Organizations are included for biographical context only; no current affiliation or endorsement is implied.
01 / Core ideas
Two movements of interpretation
Two related areas of inquiry examine how interpretations acquire institutional force and how people remain participants in accounts that shape their lives.
How interpretations acquire institutional authority
Diagnostic capture
An area of inquiry into what happens when provisional clinical interpretations enter records and institutional systems.
When does repetition begin to look like evidence?
What makes a consequential interpretation difficult to revise?
Selected Published Work
Published writing traces how names, records, and classifications can influence later interpretation.
Making Up Patients: Diagnostic Classification, Administrative Kinds, and the Limits of Psychiatric Identity
Philosophical Psychology · Forthcoming
Special issue: Ian Hacking and the Philosophy of Psychiatry
For the Misnamed
The Lancet Psychiatry · 2026
ReadWhen a Name Replaces the Story
The Polyphony · 2026
ReadShadow of a Diagnosis
Please See Me · 2025
Read
Research in Progress
Current research examines how psychiatric categories, inherited records, and AI representations enter future practices of recognition and decision-making.
Narrative and Diagnostic Capture
A categorical representation of a person can remain static and durable even as the person changes and acts back upon it. In other words, the stories we tell about ourselves also have an afterlife, shaping what we believe about who we are and what we are capable of becoming.
Once captured in documentation, interpretations can be circulated and repeatedly reactivated. What might this persistence mean for healing, post-traumatic growth, and future possibilities for health?
My research on narrative and diagnostic capture examines how clinical interpretations endure across institutional systems, continuing to shape how a person is understood even as the person, circumstances, or explanations for the original encounter change.
The project is especially concerned with what happens when contestable interpretations are carried forward through documentation and institutional practice. As these interpretations persist, their continued presence can increase the authority they are understood to possess. The question, therefore, is not only why an old story survives, but how systems of preservation can transform persistence into apparent authority, shaping what comes to count as established knowledge about a person.
Reversibility and Longitudinal AI
How AI systems should revise the status and authority of information over time, particularly when earlier representations persist but should no longer govern subsequent inference.
Current research program
When Diagnosis Becomes a Narrative Technology: Diagnostic Capture, Recognition, and Interpretive Authority
Monica A. Ross, NMTX, 2026.
Published article
2026 Health Humanities Consortium Conference
Indiana University Indianapolis, April 8–11, 2026.
Conference attended
New Mexico Texas Philosophical Society 2026
Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas, April 17–18, 2026.
Conference attended
