Gaslighting: ALS, anti-Blackness, and medicine

Abstract

Gaslighting has become a popular term to describe experiences of doubt and manipulation that make individuals or groups feel like their lived realities are not valid. Much of the theoretical work utilizing gaslighting as an analytic can be found in psychology literature or feminist domestic violence discussions. More recently, political scientists, philosophers, and sociologists have noted the structural, political, economic, and social processes that enable gaslighting to move beyond an interpersonal dynamic between women and their abusers. This essay extends these arguments through a Black feminist anthropological lens to examine how anti-Black medical gaslighting functions structurally within medical systems, individually through implicit biases held by healthcare workers, and collectively through cultural norms. Despite Black patients’ learned mistrust of the medical system and often after multiple failed attempts to receive care or answers, ethnographic vignettes reveal that Black people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and their caregivers continue to fight to be heard by the medical establishment despite being gaslit.