Veronika Denner felt like she was dying. She had blood in her stool, an overactive bladder and such severe, debilitating pain that she compared it to barbed wire being cinched around her diaphragm, intestines and pelvis.
The doctor ran the standard tests, checking her complete blood count, inflammatory markers and her abdomen via ultrasound. But when they all came back normal, he said that she was probably just stressed, given her history of childhood trauma and busy college schedule, Denner recalls.
Upset about this dismissal, she sought out doctor after doctor—with little recourse. Denner says a gastroenterologist called her “a drama queen like many women her age,” while another called her a psychopath, making up symptoms to manipulate those around her. “These doctors were getting frustrated that they couldn’t find the answer to my problems,” she says.
In reality, Denner had endometriosis—a disease that affects about 10 percent of women of reproductive age—and a particularly aggressive form, with excess tissue infiltrating her vaginal area and digestive tract. But with her doctors unable to diagnose this condition, she says they called her crazy and prescribed Xanax for anxiety.
Unfortunately, Denner’s experience is all too common. Over a third of endometriosis patients are misdiagnosed with mental health conditions, which helps delay the actual diagnosis by over four years on average in the United States. Many patients with lupus and other autoimmune diseases have similar stories, with another study finding that 36 percent of patients reported misdiagnoses of mental health or “medically unexplained symptoms.”
Medical gaslighting, or inappropriately dismissing patient symptoms, has long been an issue in health care. But many patients say the issue isn’t just rote dismissal but doctors saying their pain is “in their head” and defaulting to diagnoses like anxiety and bipolar disorder. Mental health has thus become a “scapegoat diagnosis,” as Denner puts it, for when doctors don’t know what’s going on, causing a cascade of harm.