Tigger

• Being diagnosed with COVID makes sense of symptoms, determines what we should do about them, and shapes our collective responsibility to the community.
• You have symptoms, the doctor examines or tests you, you get a name for what ails you.
• Even a diagnosis as seemingly clear-cut as COVID is more than just a label stuck to a virus.
• Read more:
  COVID testing led to new techniques of disease diagnosis: progress mustn’t stop now

Diagnosis as storytelling

• Diagnosis is so important to understanding our lives and those around us that it’s often applied outside of the health setting.
• TV shows such as House use diagnostic mysteries to underpin plots – less Whodunit and more Whatisit.
• A diagnosis is a story, in and of itself.
• You have an infection of your lungs, probably caused by bacteria or a virus and possibly triggered by that cold you had last week.

Stories and deviance

• Diagnostic stories are explanations of deviance.
• By “deviance” we mean the sociological sense of the term: an inability to meet social expectations of behaviour, belief or experience.
• To explain deviance, we often defer to diagnosis.
• More than 150 scientific authors have thrown themselves at finding a diagnosis to explain his deviance.

Medicalising experiences

• These stories say more about us, the diagnosers, and our contemporary views, than the lives of those they seek to describe.
• By using diagnosis to explain people, we medicalise our experience of the world and shut down other avenues of explanation.
• Just as explaining an imaginary character via diagnosis means we’ve lost faith in stories.