“It’s Just Stress”: How Often Women With Autoimmune Disease Are Told It’s All in Their Head

A new study of 6,607 people with autoimmune diseases finds that women were far more likely than men to have their illness first blamed on anxiety, depression or “psychosomatic” causes, and waited longer for the right answer. For anyone who has sat in that chair.

By Teona Abuladze · 6 min read

“One doctor told me I was making myself feel pain and I still can’t forget those words.”

A patient with several autoimmune diseases said that to researchers at the University of Cambridge. It was one line in a long study, published in 2025. It is also, almost word for word, something a great many women have heard and carried home with them.

This month the same team put numbers on it.

What they found

The study, led by Melanie Sloan at Cambridge with colleagues at the University of East Anglia, appeared on 12 October in eClinicalMedicine, a Lancet journal. They asked 6,607 adults with diagnosed autoimmune diseases about the road to that diagnosis: how long it took, how many appointments, and what they were told along the way.

Among women, 43 percent said their symptoms had at some point been put down to a psychiatric condition, such as anxiety or depression. Among men, 33 percent.

34 percent of women had been told their symptoms were psychosomatic, meaning caused or made worse by the mind. For men it was 22 percent.

After the researchers accounted for age, disease, continent and household finances, women still had 46 percent higher odds of a psychiatric misdiagnosis and 74 percent higher odds of a psychosomatic one.

Almost half the women in the study had, at some point, been told it was their nerves.

The wait was different too. Nearly half the men got a diagnosis within a year of their first symptoms; for women it was 40 percent. About a third of the women, 32 percent, waited four years or more. A quarter of the women saw a doctor or nurse eleven times or more before anyone named what was wrong.

Four years is a long time to feel ill and be told you’re fine. It is a whole stretch of life. Jobs, relationships and the plain question of whether you can trust your own body all get worn down in it.

Why autoimmune disease, why women

Autoimmune diseases happen when the immune system attacks the body’s own tissue: lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, Sjögren’s, type 1 diabetes and dozens more. Women make up 70 to 80 percent of cases worldwide. Scientists point to a mix of hormones, genes on the X chromosome and the immune system itself, and they are still working out why.

The early symptoms are cruelly vague. Fatigue that sleep doesn’t touch. Joint pain that moves around. Brain fog, rashes that come and go, low mood. Several of these sit right on top of the symptoms of depression or anxiety, and some autoimmune diseases, lupus especially, can affect the brain directly.

That is partly why the study found the biggest gap in the hardest-to-see diseases. More than half of people with autoimmune encephalitis and with undifferentiated connective tissue disease said they had been given a psychiatric or psychosomatic explanation first. In diseases with clear physical signs or a reliable blood test, like type 1 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis, it was under a quarter.

So the problem is partly the diseases. The study suggests it is also partly who is in the chair.

“We still often have a harder time being believed”

Shaista Tayabali, a co-author who joined the research as a patient partner, put it plainly to Euronews. Labels like “hysteria” are mostly gone, she said, but “as women we still often have a harder time having our symptoms believed and therefore addressed accurately.”

The word is old. For centuries, “hysteria” was a diagnosis for women’s bodies that doctors couldn’t explain, named after the Greek word for womb. The vocabulary changed. Researchers now describe a pattern in which the explanation women hear still bends, too often, toward the mind.

It shows up outside autoimmune disease as well. A study in Nature Medicine this month, covering more than six million people in 118 countries, found that women report more pain than men at every one of eleven sites in the body. Coverage of the study pointed to the familiar second half of that story: women may also be less likely to get proper pain relief, or to be taken seriously.

The vocabulary changed. The direction of the explanation, too often, did not.

What it does to a person

The 2025 Cambridge study looked at what happens afterwards. Patients who had been told their autoimmune disease was psychosomatic or psychiatric had higher levels of depression and anxiety and lower wellbeing. More than 80 percent said the misdiagnosis had damaged their self-worth. Seventy-two percent said it still upset them, sometimes decades later.

Sloan said at the time that many doctors meant to be reassuring when they suggested a psychological cause, but that these misdiagnoses “appear to rarely be resolved even after the correct diagnoses.”

That matches what many women describe. The diagnosis arrives, the treatment starts, and the old sentence is still there. You’re doing this to yourself. Even with lab results in hand, part of you keeps checking whether you’re exaggerating.

You weren’t. Your body was telling the truth the whole time.

The honest part

The researchers are careful, and so should we be.

These are patients’ memories, not checked against medical records. The people who answered chose to take part, and most were white women in the UK, so the numbers may not hold everywhere, including for women of color in the US, who are disproportionately affected by lupus. The study cannot say how much of the gap comes from doctors’ bias and how much from biology.

And anxiety and depression are real. David D’Cruz, a lupus specialist at Guy’s Hospital in London and one of the researchers, told Euronews: “This is not about saying that a psychiatric diagnosis is never correct.” People can have both. A mental health diagnosis is not an insult. The harm comes when it ends the search too early.

If you’re still in the waiting room

Keep a record. Dates, symptoms, what makes them worse, photos of rashes or swelling when they appear, because they often don’t show up on the day of the appointment.

Bring someone with you if you can. A second person in the room changes how a conversation goes.

If you are told it’s stress, you are allowed to ask one more question: What else could this be, and what would we need to rule it out? Ask for it to be written in your notes if a test is refused.

It is fine to ask for another opinion. A quarter of the women in this study needed eleven or more appointments. That isn’t a sign that you are difficult. It is a sign of how hard these diseases are to see.

If your symptoms come and go, say so. Several autoimmune diseases flare and settle, and a good day in the exam room doesn’t cancel a bad month.

Teona Abuladze is the founder and editor of Shansi Magazine.

If living with an undiagnosed illness, or being disbelieved, is wearing on your mental health, you don’t have to carry it alone. In the US you can call or text 988 any time to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, which also supports people in emotional distress. Patient groups such as the Autoimmune Association and the Lupus Foundation of America offer resources and community.

Sources: Sloan M. et al., “Sex and disease differences in patients’ diagnostic experiences in autoimmune diseases: an international cross-sectional study,” eClinicalMedicine, 12 October 2026 — https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eclinm.2026.104259 ; News-Medical / University of Cambridge release, 12 October 2026 — https://www.news-medical.net/news/20261012/Women-with-autoimmune-diseases-more-likely-to-receive-psychiatric-misdiagnoses.aspx ; News-Medical, detailed study summary, 15 October 2026 — https://www.news-medical.net/news/20261015/Nearly-one-in-three-women-with-autoimmune-diseases-waited-at-least-four-years-for-a-diagnosis-survey-finds.aspx ; The Pharmacist — https://www.thepharmacist.co.uk/in-practice/more-women-report-psychiatric-misdiagnosis-of-autoimmune-disease-than-men/ ; Euronews, 13 October 2026 — https://www.euronews.com/2026/10/13/women-with-autoimmune-diseases-face-longer-waits-and-more-misdiagnoses-than-men ; University of Cambridge, 2025 study in Rheumatology — https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/chronic-diseases-misdiagnosed-as-psychosomatic-can-lead-to-long-term-damage ; ScienceDaily, 3 March 2025 — https://sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/03/250303141830.htm ; McGill University on the Nature Medicine pain study, 9 October 2026 — https://www.mcgill.ca/research/node/33735 ; Madhyamam on the pain study — https://madhyamamonline.com/lifestyle/health/women-feel-more-pain-than-men-across-all-11-body-areas-1561845