Medical Gaslighting: What It Is, and Why It Leaves a Mark
You know the moment. You’re sitting on the exam table, you’ve finally gotten the appointment you waited three months for, and you say what’s been happening to your body. The doctor looks at your chart, or doesn’t, and says something like “your labs are normal, it’s just anxiety” or “have you tried reducing stress” or, my personal favorite, “have you tried drinking more water or exercising more?”
You leave feeling crazier than when you walked in.
That’s medical gaslighting. It’s not a diagnosis, and it’s not exactly a clinical term either. It’s a name patients started using because nothing else quite captured what was happening to them. Being dismissed. Being told your very real symptoms are anxiety, stress, or nothing at all. Being made to feel like the problem is your perception of your body, not your body itself.
It’s More Common Than You’d Think
If you have a chronic illness, especially one that’s harder to see or test for — POTS, EDS, endometriosis, autoimune conditions, chronic pain, anything that doesn’t show up cleanly on a standard panel — there’s a decent chance you’ve lived this more than once. Women and people of color are dismissed at higher rates than other patients, which isn’t a coincidence. A lot of diagnostic criteria were built around a narrower range of “believable” patients than the ones actually walking through the door. In many instances, the time from onset of a condition to diagnosis can be anywhere from 5-15 years if not longer. This can create many years of confusion, frustration, hopelessness, and self-doubt. In addition, many people are diagnosed with a mental health condition before being diagnosed with a physical health condition, deepening the distrust.
It doesn’t always look dramatic. Sometimes it’s a doctor rolling their eyes. Sometimes it’s just the fifth “you look totally healthy” in a row. Sometimes it’s being handed an antidepressant when what you asked about was chest pain. None of it feels like a single traumatic event. It feels like death by a thousand appointments.
Why It Can Become Trauma
Trauma isn’t only about one terrifying event. It can also be the slow accumulation of not beig believed, over and over, by people whose entire job is supposed to be helping you.
That kind of repeated dismissal does something to your nervous system. A lot of my clients describe walking into any new medical appointment already braced, rehearsing what to say, how to say it, which symptoms to leave out so they don’t sound “dramatic,” which words might get them taken seriously this time. That’s not paranoia. That’s a nervous system that learned through experience that this room might not be safe.
Some people develop something close to a phobic response to doctors’ offices. Some stop going altogether, even when something is genuinely wrong, because the fear of being dismissed again outweights the fear of the symptom itself. That’s a real cost, one with adverse health outcomes, and it’s one that gets limited attention in conversations about chronic illness.
The Part Nobody Warns You About
What makes this particularly disorienting is that it messes with your own trust in yourself. If enough people in white coats tell you it’s nothing, some part of you starts to wonder if maybe they’re right. Maybe you are overreacting. Maybe it is just anxiety. You start second guessing your own body, which is such a strange and lonely place to end up, especially when the whole reason you went to the doctor in the first place was to get help interpreting what your body was telling you.
That erosion of self-trust is, in my experience, one of the harder parts to undo. It requires relearning that your own perception of your body is valid data, even when it’s been treated as noise for years.
What Helps
I won’t pretend therapy fixes the healthcare system, because it doesn’t, and I’m not going to pretend this gets solved with a worksheet. But there is real work to do here such as processing the anger, the grief, the fear that builds up after yeras of not being believed. Rebuilding a felt sense of safety in your own body, separate from whether the last doctor took you seriously. Learning to advocate for yourself in appointments without it costing you everything emotionally beforehand.
If any of this sounds familiar, if you’ve ever left an appointment in tears, or started keeping a symptom log just to prove to yourself you’re not making it up, I want you to know that’s not an overreaction. That’s a completely reasonable response to a system that has, in a lot of ways, earned that distrust. You don’t have to carry that alone.