“I still can’t forget those words”:mixed methods study of persisting impact [of] psychosomatic and psychiatric misdiagnoses, 2025, Sloan+

This is an important topic! Is the methodology robust?

 

I’m sorry to hear that, @Hutan

I’m in a similar spot. My main concern about reaching out to new HC workers is how much gaslighting I have to deal with. Especially when my carers don’t fully understand my condition and the scientific methods.

 

I thought you meant it’s horrifying in the sense it was taken over by psychobehaviouralists. Just to clarify for people who don’t feel like clicking the link, it’s horrifying because so many people share experiences of psychosomatic misfiagnosis.

 

It's there now: Link

 

I mentioned it a few times before, but when the topic of medical gaslighting comes up on random discussions in forums with zero relevance to health, let alone to discriminated chronic illnesses, stories like this are very common. And they balloon out unless the first responses are from physicians who feel the need to mock it. This is a huge problem that medicine has intentionally nurturing and growing for decades, and it will only get worse over time as electronic records act as a brand on people, a mark that says "do not help". There is no escaping the mark.

This all exposes the lie of the so-called Hippocratic oath, that it's just a bunch of words with no force behind them. It's not even ironic that it makes people's mental health worse, it's by design. It's not what they want that design to lead to, but it's what it's designed to produce. They do harm. By choice. Lots of it. Clinical psychology is decades away from being actionable. If it ever really will. The tools are too primitive and mediocre.

And that's before you consider the criminality of how this makes good research impossible, keeping people in misery indefinitely. When the medical profession chooses to go along with delusional fantasies about some illnesses, they stop working on them. This has the same consequences, and so should have the same punishment, as outright fraud. It's also philosophically the same failure of preferring divine explanations and thus refusing to deal with reality as it is. It's wrong on so many levels: humanly, philosophically, professionally, ethically and morally. It's basically nothing but wrong with zero clear benefits.

It's actually understood well enough that this argument has been made a lot about the lost decades on Alzheimer's research caused by fraudulent research. And in the case of psychosomatic blocks it's far more egregious, as fraud goes it's 100x worse than what Theranos did. Almost every Theranos investor got their money back. None of us get our lives back, certainly not the money and life experience we lost. That loss is permanent, and entirely intentional. The intention being 19th century delusional models based on a toxic mix of mysticism and narcissism.

 

I don’t dare to take a peak.

 

I’ll give you the positives!

There are some sympathetic healthcare workers that have experienced this themselves, and even someone pointing out the fact that a high degree of healthcare avoidance in the paper is the complete opposite of the usual narrative in the sub about ‘psychosomatic patients’ that keep returning for the same issues.

 

For reference, r/science has 33 million users, r/medicine has 0.5 million.

 

though the upvote to comment ratio difference shows that r/medicine deems the paper far more controversial. Also thanks for the positives summary Utsikt and SNT

 

It's really odd that some comment on health care avoidance when it's one of the main targets in psychosomatic ideology, and that, of course, this is common. The problem they are making is that they assume that people can tell psychosomatic illnesses from 'real' illnesses, and so would only avoid health care for psychological issues, not 'real' ones. Which shows how very few MDs actually believe the public-facing lies about how they 'feel' just as real. Most don't believe that, they say it anyway because it reassures themselves.

But, no. It comes with it, it's mixed and baked in the cake mix. They never seem to get that, and of course it's a huge problem, but it's not politically possible to get reliable data on this, because no one wants to find that out. But, oh yeah, you're damn right there are millions of babies out there thrown out with the bathwater. You can't run an industrial scale pump-and-dump system without it. This is not a profession that handles uncomfortable truths well.

 

Huh, the thread in r/medicine is locked now, and I believe it’s only accessible through the link. r/science is still up, but the thread has died down.

There are a few removed comments with references to rules about ‘no personal medical stories’, and a heated debate regarding FND.

It doesn’t seem like there was much discussion about the actual paper, which is a shame. So I assume the mods locked it down before things got even more off track. Understandable decisions IMO.

This reminds me of why I deleted reddit and mostly spend my time here: it’s a lot easier when everyone tries to discuss the same topic. And the mods do a fantastic job by moving posts to other threads if needed.

 

I’m sorry you are stuck being treated this way

I think everyone used to know this is just a thin excuse for staff to provide bad treatment- and the bad treatment/bottom of list comes first , strangely except for inside medicine . It would be fascinating to have someone researching how these code terms really work and how many believe them, how many see through them completely (and take it as saying more about the person who wrote it than the patient) and how many just effectively take on someone else’s ‘grudge’ for them without being curious about the real reason whether it is warranted.

it’s bonkers that it’s allowed these days guven data protection and FOI rights etc everywhere else . But the idea psychosomatic is real lingering as emperors new clothes seems to act as an excuse/cover up for all sorts