Medical Gaslighting: When Your Doctor Makes You Feel Crazy

By Madora Pennington, PNN Columnist

"Gaslighting" describes the act of deceiving someone to make that person question themselves. It is a toxic interpersonal exchange, an act of psychological abuse that causes the recipient to doubt their own experiences and judgments.

According to sociologists, gaslighters are often insecure, and withhold approval or use hostility to gain the recipient's compliance. The gaslightee is motivated to go along with gaslighting to save the relationship.

This relationship pattern is eerily familiar in the medical exam room. The patient arrives, tells the doctor their symptoms, and expects the doctor to diagnose and treat them. The doctor has the same idea of how their interaction should play out.

“Medical gaslighting” occurs when a healthcare provider dismisses a patient’s symptoms or health concerns. Instead of listening, doing research or referring the patient to a more qualified specialist, the doctor disregards the patient’s issues, blames the patient, or declares the symptoms normal.

The doctor may even diagnose the patient with "conversion disorder" and state in their medical records that the patient’s symptoms are the result of psychological stress or even a personality disorder.

Missed Diagnosis

What happens when the doctor is wrong and a patient is misdiagnosed with conversion disorder?

Kristy Collins knows what that is like. She sought help at multiple facilities for her disabling symptoms, but instead was labeled as having conversion disorder. Kristy had her worst experiences at teaching hospitals.

“It felt like the doctor was in a position as a professor, being looked at by students who expected to have an answer. Not having one, the doctor seemed stumped, even humiliated,” she told me.

That's when the doctor announced that Kristy had a conversion disorder and entered the diagnostic code for it on her medical chart -- essentially a reason to stop treating her. She was soon discharged.

At another office visit, a psychiatrist asked Kristy about her relationship with her father. “I’ve seen a softer side to him because of my medical problems,” Kristy answered. The psychiatrist ran with this, declaring that Kristy yearned for her father’s love.

Kristy and her father were mystified by that because they had always been close. She had no need to invent medical problems to get his attention or to spend time with him. But there was no changing the doctor’s mind.

At one point, Kristy’s father begged her doctors to tell him where they could get her conversion disorder treated. They were willing to pay out-of-pocket for care, if that meant Kristy could get better. The doctors had no place to recommend. They merely insisted she get in an ambulance to go home.

It turned out that Kristy was suffering from undiagnosed and difficult-to-recognize genetic problems. They were the real causes behind her mysterious medical issues. A neurosurgeon at Children’s Hospital of Orange County diagnosed her with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, Chiari malformation and hydrocephalus.

Kristy says she is not angry at the medical community, even after all the horrible treatment she'd been through. That’s in part because of the doctor who finally diagnosed her correctly.

“He hugged me and apologized for all of the bad doctors. That allowed me to forgive,” she said.

For Kristy, that appointment was healing.

Madora Pennington is the author of the blog LessFlexible.com about her life with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. She graduated from UC Berkeley with minors in Journalism and Disability Studies.