ABSTRACT
The diagnostic moment has an unrivaled capacity for encompassment and exclusion, both as an expression and as a vehicle of authoritative medical reference. Inside this moment, when an illness is named, there exists a cascade of response and resistance through which relationships of power are negotiated. Social scientists have long recognized that governmental funding patterns, private market investment, and social responses ranging from care to stigma cohere around and respond to these diagnostic moments, and to the nosological categories that hold sway over them, while unrecognized and unnamed suffering remains invisible.
