Gaslighting is a clinical diagnosis
| Gaslighting is a clinical diagnosis | |
|---|---|
| FALSE | |
| "Gaslighting is a recognized psychiatric diagnosis or disorder that clinicians can diagnose." | |
| Domain | Health & Medicine |
| Tactic | False Context |
| Era | Current |
| First seen | 2010s |
| Origin | Popular psychology content and social media in the 2010s and 2020s |
| Last reviewed | 2026-10-30 |
| Further reading: books on Health & Medicine | |
As "gaslighting" became a common word, it was often presented as a formal clinical term, as if a person could be diagnosed as a gaslighter or a victim could receive a gaslighting diagnosis.
Gaslighting describes a pattern of behavior. It is not a diagnosis in the major psychiatric classification systems.
What the evidence shows
- Not in the manuals. Gaslighting does not appear as a diagnosis in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR) or the World Health Organization's ICD-11.
- Clinical history. Psychiatrists Russell Barton and J. A. Whitehead described "The gas-light phenomenon" in The Lancet in 1969, writing about cases in which people tried to have relatives committed to hospital by making them appear mentally ill. The term has been used descriptively in psychology since.
- Research. Sociologists and psychologists, such as Paige Sweet in a 2019 study, have studied gaslighting as a feature of abusive relationships and power imbalances. It is recognized as a form of psychological abuse, which is not the same as a diagnosis.
Why it matters
Treating a description of behavior as a diagnosis can lend false clinical authority to accusations in everyday disputes, while making it harder to take real cases of psychological abuse seriously.
Gaslighting This page explains what gaslighting is, and is not, in psychology. The word comes from Patrick Hamilton's 1938 play Gas Light and the 1944 film Gaslight, in which a husband dims the gas lamps and insists his wife is imagining it. Where the word comes from · More gaslighting cases
Sources
- Russell Barton and J. A. Whitehead, "The gas-light phenomenon," The Lancet, vol. 293, no. 7608, June 1969.
- American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition, text revision (DSM-5-TR), 2022.
- Paige L. Sweet, "The Sociology of Gaslighting," American Sociological Review, vol. 84, no. 5, 2019.