Diagnostic Categories in Autobiographical Accounts of Illness

Working within frameworks drawn from the writings of Immanuel Kant, Alfred Schutz, and Kenneth Burke, this article examines the role that diagnostic categories play in autobiographical accounts of illness, with a special focus on chronic disease. Four lay diagnostic categories, each with different connections to formal medical diagnostic categories, serve as typifications to make sense of the way the lifeworld changes over the course of chronic illness. These diagnostic categories are used in conjunction with another set of typifications: lay epidemiologies, lay etiologies, lay prognostics, and lay therapeutics. Together these serve to construct and reconstruct the self at the center of the lifeworld. Embedded within the lay diagnostic categories are narratives of progression, regression, or stability, forms of typification derived from literary and storytelling genres. These narratives are developed by the self in autobiographical accounts of illness.