Soon after, as I was sitting writing my notes, the same specialist came to see the patient and provide his clinical impression. Immediately, he created the grounds for me to doubt my judgment in calling. He had established that the issue I was calling about was nonurgent before I could even state my case. Within 1 minute, he had established a power dynamic: his time was more important than mine-my concern was nothing but part of the rabble lighting up his phone all day. The specialist continued to cut me off, condescending in tone and dismayed at being disrupted “all day.”Īnd so the gaslighting began. Thrown off base, I stumbled to justify my reason for calling. On the phone he was quick to interrupt me, telling me he was “very, very busy.” He was audibly frustrated I was told I was disturbing him during a dictation. I followed up with the specialist via a phone call later that day to review the worrying results. The specialist had been consulted by the emergency room physician early in the morning, but he had not yet seen the patient. While working as a hospitalist, a sick patient’s imaging came back with concerning findings near the end of my workday. Worse, I doubted my own skills and the reality in front of me. Let me walk you through a recent encounter that left me feeling uneasy and small. This made it all the more shocking when my specialist colleagues have used their status as an expert to try to convince me of something I know to be false or not in the best interests of my patients. As a generalist, when I interact with specialists, it is normally a positive and productive experience facilitated by mutual trust and respect. The tools to address it were outside my reach. Until recently, I did not have the right words to describe this aggression, nor did I understand the roots of its resulting disorientation.
Gaslight defintion professional#
As a woman who is also a family physician, I have been gaslit multiple times by colleagues in professional settings. However, the term also deserves a place within the culture of medicine. Gaslighting as a term has critical and established use describing abuse toward victims of intimate partner violence and patients. While I am writing about gaslighting between medical professionals, I do not wish to monopolize the term for this context. Gaslighting between medical professionals For some who have experienced it, the feeling can be worse than physical abuse. The concept first gained traction as a construct in the psychological literature during the 1960s, and it pervades domestic and professional spaces to this day.
Gaslighting is when someone in power uses manipulation to make another person doubt his or her own judgment, or even sanity. Among these cruel and subtle torments, he gradually dims their home’s gas-fueled lights while vehemently denying doing so, causing his wife to question her own perception of reality.
Gaslight defintion series#
Set in London in 1880, Gaslight tells the story of a man who pushes his new wife to doubt her own sanity through a series of manipulative tactics. By recognizing gaslighting in medicine, this form of bullying can be brought to an end. Within the culture of medicine, gaslighting is a phenomenon I have both observed and experienced as a generalist. This film, and the play on which it is based, gave rise to the term gaslighting-a form of psychological abuse. Did the light just dim on its own? Much later in the film, she questions this again, but this time screaming, convinced she is losing her mind. As she stares at a dimming gas-fueled lamp, confusion sets in.
Gaslight defintion movie#
Early in the black-and-white movie Gaslight, the protagonist (played by Ingrid Bergman) sits alone in her bedroom.
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