When Women's Pain Gets Ignored: Medical Gaslighting, Misdiagnosis, and the Path to Healing

Written By Emily Myers

When Women's Pain Gets Ignored: Medical Gaslighting & Misdiagnosis

Research shows women's pain is routinely dismissed, misdiagnosed, or labeled "just hormones." Learn how medical gaslighting affects mental health and how therapy can help.

Your Pain Is Real

You describe your symptoms. The doctor nods, orders no tests, and says something like: "It's probably just stress," or "This is normal at your age," or "Have you tried relaxing more?"

You leave feeling dismissed — and wondering if maybe they're right. Maybe you are overreacting.

You're not.

What you may have experienced is a pattern researchers and clinicians now recognize as medical gaslighting — the dismissal, minimization, or psychological misattribution of a patient's symptoms without adequate investigation. And research consistently shows it disproportionately affects women.

This post brings together findings from Harvard Medical School, the American Medical Women's Association (AMWA), the United Nations, peer-reviewed journals, and other credible sources to explain what's happening — and why therapy can be a meaningful part of healing when the healthcare system has failed you.

The Data Is Clear: Women's Pain Is Treated Differently

This isn't a matter of perception. The evidence is well-documented across multiple studies and institutions.

A large international study published in PNAS (2024) found that women wait an average of 30 minutes longer than men to be seen in hospital emergency settings and are less likely to receive pain medication for the same complaints. Writing about this research, Harvard Health noted that women's pain scores are also less likely to be recorded by nurses upon arrival — and that this disparity holds regardless of the gender of the provider treating them. (Harvard Health Publishing, 2025)

A 2025 narrative review published in PubMed Central (Harrilal-Maharaj et al.) found that gender bias consistently shapes diagnostic pathways for women across neurology, cardiology, autoimmune disease, and chronic pain — with symptoms like fatigue, chest discomfort, and multisystem complaints routinely attributed to stress or psychological causes rather than investigated medically. (PMC12829432)

Meanwhile, a January 2025 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that research on diseases disproportionately affecting women has been chronically underfunded compared to diseases that primarily affect men. (The Conversation / National Academies, 2025)

The United Nations reported in 2026 that endometriosis — affecting roughly 1 in 10 women worldwide — carries a diagnosis delay of between four and twelve years, a direct consequence of normalizing and dismissing women's pain. Women also spend more years in poor health than men (10.9 years on average vs. 8.0), much of it living with undertreated chronic conditions. (UN News, 2026)

"It's Just Hormones": When Dismissal Becomes a Diagnosis

One of the most common forms of medical gaslighting women experience is having their physical or emotional symptoms chalked up to hormones — and nothing more.

Health in Her HUE describes this pattern clearly: the phrase "it's just hormones" functions as a conversational full stop that teaches women to second-guess their bodies, normalize discomfort, and delay seeking care. For conditions like PMDD and endometriosis — which are frequently underdiagnosed, with patients waiting years before receiving proper evaluation — that early dismissal can mean years of unnecessary suffering. (Health in Her HUE, 2026)

For Black women, this dynamic is compounded. Racial bias, reduced healthcare access, and a well-founded historical mistrust of medical institutions add additional layers to an already difficult experience. Research consistently shows that Black women's pain is even more likely to be dismissed or undertreated.

The problem isn't that hormones don't affect health — they do. The problem is that "hormones" is used to end the clinical conversation rather than deepen it. When providers stop asking how severe, how frequent, and how much this affects your daily life, conditions go undiagnosed and women go untreated.

When Physical Symptoms Are Mislabeled as Mental Illness

There is also a troubling flip side to this pattern: women's physical symptoms are frequently over-psychiatrized — misdiagnosed as anxiety, depression, or psychosomatic illness — while their actual mental health conditions are sometimes missed entirely.

The AMWA Gender Equity Task Force (2025) describes this as a dual failure. On one hand, women presenting with fatigue, pain, or nonspecific somatic complaints are more likely than men to receive a psychiatric diagnosis even when the underlying cause is thyroid disease, an autoimmune disorder, or a chronic pain syndrome. On the other hand, conditions like ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, and bipolar disorder are historically underdiagnosed in women because clinical training has long relied on male-normative presentations. Some sources estimate misdiagnosis rates for depression alone may run as high as 30–50%. (AMWA Gender Equity Task Force, 2025)

A 2025 peer-reviewed article in PubMed Central on medical gaslighting and patient-clinician mistrust documented that in studies of patients with chronic vulvovaginal conditions, over half had at some point considered giving up on seeking medical care altogether — and some had been told by their doctors to "just relax" or "have a glass of wine." (PMC, 2025)

Clinician training is a core part of the problem. As AMWA notes, medical education continues to rely on male-centric disease prototypes, meaning that the same condition can present differently in women without providers being equipped to recognize it. ADHD in women, for instance, more often presents as inattentiveness and compensatory coping — not the hyperactivity associated with boys — and goes unidentified until adulthood as a result.

The Psychological Toll of Being Dismissed

Medical gaslighting isn't just a healthcare failure. It's a psychological one.

A 2024 systematic review published in the Journal of Professional & Applied Psychology (Khan, Tariq, & Majeed) identified seven recurring themes in women's experiences with medical gaslighting: denial and dismissal of symptoms, delayed diagnosis, negative provider relationships, gender bias, the exhausting burden of self-advocacy, mental health stigmatization, and anxiety and trauma. The review concluded that women's experiences with the healthcare system are overwhelmingly negative, leading directly to worsening health outcomes.

In 2025, the Emergency Care Research Institute (ECRI) named the dismissal of patient concerns the top threat to patient safety across all of medicine. A HealthCentral survey found that over 94% of respondents felt their doctors had ignored or dismissed their symptoms, and more than 61% said their doctors made them feel "crazy" or blamed them for their condition. (Psychology Today, 2025)

The University of Kansas School of Medicine has documented how repeated dismissals communicate to patients that their symptoms are imagined — eroding both self-trust and trust in the healthcare system. Patients who anticipate being dismissed are less likely to seek care at all, sometimes delaying treatment for serious conditions. (KU Medical Center)

Over time, the psychological impact of medical gaslighting can include:

  • Chronic self-doubt and difficulty trusting one's own perceptions

  • Anxiety and hypervigilance around medical appointments

  • Depression and a sense of helplessness

  • Trauma responses, including avoidance of medical care

  • Internalized shame — the belief that the problem is you, not the system

What Therapy Can Offer

If any of this resonates, you are not alone — and these experiences are valid, treatable, and worth addressing with professional support.

Therapy offers a space that medicine often doesn't: one where your experience is taken at face value, your perceptions are respected, and your emotional responses to difficult healthcare encounters are understood in context rather than pathologized.

Specific ways therapy can help:

Processing medical trauma. For many women, repeated dismissal by healthcare providers accumulates into something that looks a lot like trauma — a hypervigilant nervous system, avoidance, shame, and difficulty advocating for yourself in high-stakes settings. Trauma-informed therapy can help you process these experiences and rebuild a sense of agency.

Untangling what's physical and what's psychological. Living with chronic pain or an undiagnosed condition affects mental health — that's not weakness, it's biology. A skilled therapist can help you hold both realities at once: your physical symptoms are real and the stress, grief, and frustration they cause deserve attention too.

Rebuilding self-trust. Medical gaslighting is designed, even if unintentionally, to make you doubt yourself. Therapy can help you reconnect with your own perception, strengthen your sense of bodily authority, and develop language for what you're experiencing.

Preparing for healthcare interactions. Therapists who work with women's health concerns can help you develop concrete strategies for communicating your needs clearly, setting limits with dismissive providers, knowing when to seek a second opinion, and managing the anxiety that medical appointments can trigger.

Addressing intersecting stressors. For women of color, LGBTQ+ women, and others who face compounded bias in healthcare settings, therapy provides a place to address the cumulative emotional weight of navigating systems that were not built with you in mind.

You Deserve to Be Believed

The research is unambiguous: women's pain has been systematically undertreated, misattributed, and dismissed for decades. This is not a personal failing. It is a structural one — rooted in funding gaps, training gaps, cultural biases, and a medical history that treated men as the default patient.

Knowing this doesn't make it less painful when it happens to you. But it can help you understand that your frustration is warranted, your symptoms deserve investigation, and seeking support — whether medical or therapeutic — is never overreacting.

If you've experienced medical gaslighting and are looking for a therapist who understands the intersection of physical health, gender, and mental wellbeing,

Sources & Further Reading

Emily Myers
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