We study a multistage epidemic model which generalizes the SIR model and where infected individuals go through K ≥ 1 stages of the epidemic before being re- moved. An infected individual in stage k ∈ {1, . . . , K } may infect a susceptible individual, who directly goes to stage k of the epidemic; or it may go to the next stage k+1 of the epidemic. For this model, we identify the critical regime in which we establish diffusion approximations. Surprisingly, the limiting diffusion exhibits an unusual form of state space collapse which we analyze in detail.