The Dangers of Medical Gaslighting
BY: Sarah Martin
There’s a particular kind of fear that comes from being sick and unheard at the same time. It’s the moment you realize the person meant to help you has already decided your suffering isn’t real.
Ignored, Dismissed and Finally Collapsing Into Truth
By the time she finally sat on the crinkling paper of the exam table, she had been feeling worse for months. Not tired, but drained. Not queasy, but nauseated to the point of dreading mornings. It was not just a headache; it was a splitting pain that made light feel like her head would explode. She dropped weight without trying and had not felt like herself in months. She had tried everything she could think of: more water, more sleep, fewer screens, over-the-counter painkillers, and healthier meals. Nothing helped. Every day, she felt awful, and it was getting difficult to function in her daily life.
Still, she held onto hope as she clutched the neatly written list of symptoms she’d been updating for weeks. Getting an appointment had taken forever, but now she was here. Now she could finally get answers.
She explained everything—when it started, how it felt, what she’d tried, and what she feared. She even mentioned her family history of diabetes and autoimmune disease, hoping it would help the doctor connect the dots. Instead, he barely looked up from his computer.
“It doesn’t sound too concerning,” he said. “Probably stress. Maybe drink more water.”
She was stunned and at a loss for words. She was drinking water and wasn’t stressed. She explained again how abnormal this felt, how her body wasn’t behaving like her body anymore. She asked if they could run labs,just to be safe. The doctor sighed, rushed, and was already halfway out the door. “We can do some basic tests, but really, you need to work on your stress.”
When the results came back “normal enough,” the message was the same: You’re fine. It’s just stress.
Ok, so maybe I am crazy, she thought. Maybe I am stressed, and it’s in my head?
She wasn’t fine. She kept getting worse. Weeks passed. She went in again with the same results. She called again, desperate for help, and when she finally got in, she repeated everything—symptoms in hand, voice shaking with frustration. She was told it was anxiety. Again, she was told it was “nothing serious,” and yet again she felt crazy and frustrated, like she was screaming in a crowded room for help and no one could hear her. One afternoon, at work, her body gave out. She fainted.
At the ER, where no one dismissed her symptoms as stress, the truth finally surfaced: she had diabetes. Not newly diabetic, but an undiagnosed diabetic. Due to the fact that she had gone so long without treatment, her kidneys and heart were already showing signs of damage. All of this was because her doctor dismissed her and would not hear her concern, and run a few more tests. The diagnosis was finally hers, but the fear remained. She couldn’t bring herself to return to the exam table only to be told, once again, that she was wrong about her own body.
The Compounding Effects of Diagnostic Delay and Provider Bias
“The experience of being dismissed or disparaged by medical professionals can be shocking and demoralizing for patients, leading to unnecessary harms, including the avoidance of future medical treatment, depression, and the experience of shame.” (Shapiro & Hayburn, 2024). Patients whose symptoms are dismissed often go months or years without proper testing. This leads to worsened outcomes, anxiety, shame, and, in severe cases, even death due to missed diagnosis. There is even a disproportionate impact on certain groups, such as women, patients of color, those with chronic illnesses, those with“invisible symptoms,” and LGBTQ + individuals. Black women in particular consistently have health concerns dismissed or downplayed by providers, especially relating to pregnancy and postpartum care. As a result, Black women in the U.S. are three to four times more likely to die from preventable pregnancy-related complications, according to a National Center for Health Statistics report. Imagine, instead of being excited to welcome your child into the world, living with that statistic and fear over your head every day, worried if you will survive bringing them into the world.
Too often, women are dealing with chronic, crippling pain, going back and forth to doctors only to be dismissed or told, “It’s normal.”Gender bias in general for women in healthcare is a historical issue. It leads to many late, wrong, or missed diagnoses for conditions that can cause irreparable damage and affect every part of one’s life. “Conditions like endometriosis further illustrate the toll of dismissive attitudes. Despite endometriosis affecting roughly 10% of women, patients wait on average about seven years after initial symptom onset to get a diagnosis. This prolonged diagnostic delay is due in part to physicians normalizing women’s menstrual pain or misattributing severe symptoms to benign causes, rather than investigating them rigorously” (Faytong-Haro, M. 2025).
So many women live with crippling pain, fatigue, digestive issues, infertility, and more. Yet their concern is constantly met with gaslighting, dismissal of symptoms, and the crushing mental toll of not being heard and helped. By the time the disease is caught, the damage is often irreversible.
When Mental Illness Becomes a Medical Blindfold
Patients living with mental illness already carry a heavy enough burden, yet they are often the first to be dismissed when something else is wrong. Imagine a man with bipolar disorder who keeps showing up at his doctor’s office with crushing chest pain and dizzy spells. Instead of being evaluated with the same urgency anyone else would receive, he’s waved off with a patronizing reminder to “take your meds” and “stay consistent with therapy.” He tries to explain—calmly, repeatedly—that he’s been stable on his medication for years and knows his own body, but the label of “mentally ill” hangs over him, a label he can never escape.
Each visit ends the same way: minimized, brushed aside, and made to feel as though his fear is just another symptom of his diagnosis. Then one day, the chest pain he was told to ignore becomes a full heart attack, something that could have been caught, treated, and prevented if only someone had listened instead of assuming his mind was the problem.
“Diagnostic overshadowing occurs when physical symptoms reported by a patient with a psychiatric diagnosis or intellectual disability are misattributed to their mental health condition, leading clinicians to overlook a potential medical cause. A systematic review found that both mental health patients and providers frequently reported physical complaints being overshadowed by focus on a pre- existing mental illness. In other words, if a patient has a psychiatric label, clinicians might assume new symptoms are “just due to” that disorder instead of investigating them. (Faytong-Haro, M. 2025).
A Warning the Healthcare System Can’t Keep Missing
There are sadly endless examples of the true impact of medical gaslighting, and each one shows how quickly a person’s very real suffering can be dismissed into silence. Picture the patient who’s told, “Your labs are normal, so nothing is wrong,” even as fatigue, weight changes, and brain fog take over their life. They start wondering if they’re imagining everything, and they stop mentioning new symptoms to avoid seeming dramatic. Months later they learned a silently progressing autoimmune disorder had been damaging their body all along. There is also the example of the young adult who hears, “You’re too young to have anything serious,” when they report severe joint pain. They leave feeling foolish for even asking, avoid follow-ups to escape the embarrassment, and eventually discover early-onset rheumatoid arthritis. However, it was diagnosed only after irreversible damage had already taken hold.
In the ever-evolving world of healthcare, physicians are overworked, understaffed, and forced to justify every test to insurance companies that have turned healthcare into a business transaction rather than a human interaction. Biases and preconceived notions about certain patient populations only deepen the danger, making it even easier for someone’s pain to be dismissed before it’s ever understood, and gaslighting, even if unintentional by the provider, to occur.
“These systems place pressures both on providers and patients, which may influence provider and patient interactions and behaviors. A power differential also exists between providers and patients. Providers serve as the ultimate gatekeepers to medical tests, treatments, and diagnoses, often leading patients to defer to them as experts. Patients may also have concerns about how their provider perceives them. Providers hold the expertise and competence to speak to the etiology of patients’ suffering, while patients hold the competence and expertise to speak to the experience of their suffering, and both share the seriousness of suffering.” (Fuss, A., Jagielski, C. H., & Taft, T. , 2024).
When a person is repeatedly told their symptoms are “nothing,” “stress,” or “in their head,” the damage goes far beyond the missed diagnosis. Self-doubt creeps in. Shame silences them. They stop seeking help, isolate themselves, and carry the weight of unvalidated suffering. Depression and anxiety take root where trust should have been. The consequences are not theoretical—they are worsening chronic illness, organ damage, loss of function, emergency hospitalizations, long-term disability, and, in the most tragic cases, preventable death. When patients are made to feel like their symptoms are invented or exaggerated, how can they possibly feel safe seeking care? How can they trust a system that doesn’t trust them?
As we step back from these stories and the research that surrounds them, what emerges is not just a collection of individual experiences but a broader pattern of how easily suffering can be overlooked when systems are strained and assumptions go unchallenged. The examples in this article show how quickly a person’s reality can be reshaped by dismissal – how symptoms become minimized , how doubt takes root, and how delayed care can alter the course of someone’s health long before they understand what is happening to them. These moments are not rare outliers; they are part of a larger landscape shaped by workload pressures, implicit bias, and the quiet power imbalance that defines most medical encounters. Acknowledging that complexity doesn’t assign blame-it simply helps us see the full picture of what patients and providers are navigating.
As you move forward, consider how these dynamics show up in your own experiences or in the stories shared by people around you. Notice the moments when someone’s concerns are heard clearly, and the moments when they are not. Awareness alone cannot fix every gap in the system, but it can change the way we listen, speak up and the way we understand the experiences of others. Let this be an invitation to pause, reflect, and stay attentive to the realities that often go unseen.
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References
Shapiro, D. & Hayburn, A. (November 2024). Medical gaslighting as a mechanism for medical trauma: case studies and analysis. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12144-024-06935- 0?utm_source=copilot.com
Faytong-Haro, M. (November 2025). Medical gaslighting: navigating patient- clinician mistrust in healthcare. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/health- services/articles/10.3389/frhs.2025.1633672/full?utm_source=copilot.com
Fuss, A., Jagielski, C. H., & Taft, T. (2024). We didn’t start the fire…or did we?-a narrative review of medical gaslighting and introduction to medical invalidation. Translational gastroenterology and hepatology, 9, 73. https://doi.org/10.21037/tgh-24-26
