Do doctors dismiss your physical illnesses as mental issues?

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I was in the ER several days ago because my blood pressure was in the hypertensive crisis range. I had kidney issues a few years ago so they tested my blood, and meanwhile kept checking my blood pressure. It remained dangerously high for a few hours, and eventually they came back and said there was no physical reason for the high blood pressure, and that I needed to calm down because I was doing it to myself.

The entire time I was at the ER I was calm, polite, sitting patiently, not particularly anxious compared to my anxiety levels over time. The only reason they had to dismiss me and patronizingly tell me I was causing my own problems was because I have a diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder.

They eventually put me on medication for the blood pressure, and it has lowered somewhat, but I have had a very bad headache and nausea that has persisted since Sunday night. I see my GP on Friday so I will be looking for some answers.

Does anyone else get dismissed when they have physical conditions because of their mental health status?

I don't even mention my autism diagnosis any more because I can't deal with all the "oh you don't seem autistic to me".

as someone who has practiced medicine, i can say that to dismiss symptoms, especially something as objective and potentially damaging as hypertension, isn't good practice. we had a saying: crazy people can get sick. it's not PC, but it's a reminder to take all symptoms of anyone seriously until such symptoms are proved not to be serious. i'm very sorry that happened to you.

I haven't so far had the bad luck to experience this, though I have other bones to pick regarding doctors, but this is certainly a worrying scenario. I'm not sure how the system works regarding a GP's access to confidential patient medical files here in the UK, but it makes me uncomfortable to think this biased judgement might be going on to potentially jeopardise someone's health. I don't know whether being logged into their database means all they have to do is type your surname to see the sordid details of all past mental illness or whether they'd have to request more information.
In any case, doctors should really be concentrating on the present situation rather than what you may have dealt with in the past. They wouldn't say a broken leg was 'all in your mind'. I hope.

All
The
Time....

It has taken me 17 YEARS to finally find a doctor who figured out my blood pressure issue. I have white coat hypertension and Conn's syndrome. 5 doctors later....

If you think you get crap for anxiety, try being bipolar.

If you are in pain, it's because you are looking for drugs since BP has a high percentage of people who self medicate. Oh you are here, because of attention seeking behaviors.

I don't smoke, drink or drug. I'm routinely drug tested because of my mental health diagnosis.

I could go on for hours about the BS treatment I have received. Now, I only tell them about the bipolar disorder if I absolutely have to.

Yes! Doctors have almost killed me on two occasions beause of this.

That was very unprofessional of them. Saying you are doing this to yourself because of your GAD diagnoses implies you are doing it on purpose. No one has anxiety of purpose. How do you even make yourself have it lol?

But my mom likes to blame everything on my anxiety including my AS symptoms and calls everything anxiety, it drives me crazy.

Late addition, I actually am diagnosed with bipolar 1 also, but I get more crap from the GAD diagnosis. Most doctors don't even say anything about the bipolar diagnosis, unless I'm specifically seeking help for bipolar at the time. The only one who really deals with bipolar stuff is my psychiatrist, who is absolutely wonderful and I can tell she respects me and I respect her. I'm lucky in that regard. Also I've been hospitalized 5 times for bipolar over the past 10 years and at first they were really long stays but they've gotten progressively shorter until the last one was only 2 weeks and luckily I've learned to advocate over the years and the last 2 times wound up with the same hospital psychiatrist who was competent and treated me like a person.

Me too.

The first diagnosed me with ''IBS"" without doing any tests when I was 17 because I was depressed and had PTSD and supposedly that caused my GI issues in his eyes, well 10 years later in the emergency room it turned out to be Crohns disease and I had struggled with it for 10 years without treatment. That almost killed me.

Then two years later I started to have problems breathing, and because I was calm and collected at the ER they thought it was just side effects from the Prednisone I took and sent me home from the emergency room three times in a weekend. I called my specialist on the monday after and it turned out I had a saddle embolus, one of the deadliest kinds of blood clots you can get and I had a 25% chance to survive that night. I am so grateful that my own GI doctor DID listen, or I would have been dead.

I am still alive, but I often struggle with my calm demeanor and doctors not taking me seriously because of it. I can't feign panic or cry like NT's do when I am in pain or am really concerned (I am used to pain and can't cry because of it) and I often get neglected when it comes to pain medication or treatment because of it. Because of my Aspergers, the more stressed I get the more calm my face looks because I get tense but I don't cry and as long as you're not crying or whimpering NT doctors think you're not in real pain or don't have real problems.

When I'm feeling frustrated and snarky I get the attitude of, and have occasionally said it to health car providers, that medicine often looks more like an unscientific faith-based belief system than most faith-based religions do.
I've been fortunate in having rather more occasions of good than bad treatment.
I've only fired one general practitioner.

One time had a surgeon who pegged me as autistic right away at our first meeting since she had an adult son who is.
When she asked and I said, yep, I am, she said okay, then picked up the full report, sat next to me, and we went through it page by page.
Way cool and much appreciated.

I have a couple neurological and endocrine diseases which are known to cause chronic pain; plus some spine and foot problems, and, yes, I'm always evaluating whether these providers seem likely to dismiss me as a drug seeker.
It is wearying to have to do that all the time every time.

Fortunately ('fortunately'?) it helps, ('helps'?) when the back spams are strong enough they can see them happening the moment they lift your shirt. Ya can't fake that!

I have yet to meet a doctor who is both willing and able to look behind all the symptoms I might be showing at any given moment and try to get to the root cause/s, condition/s or whatever. I once spent three days in a medical ICU when my blood pressure was 280/140 and nobody tried to help me figure out what was going on. I was already taking maximum dosages of two BP meds at the time...and then two days later I was pushed out of the hospital after the staff had actually stopped checking my BP and a psychiatrist had said he would do some follow-up but never did. I no longer need to be concerned about landing back in an ICU, but only because I have done a lot of research and made some changes suggested by a doctor who thinks beyond-the-box and has a website.

I don't accept that there is this "wall" seperating "physical" and "mental". "Physical" issues can cause "mental" issues. I don't accept that "mental" issues are automatically less serious than "physical" issues.

I've only been to the gp once in the last 11 years. I got fed up with gps dismissing physical concerns as mental health issues.

what a crappy ER than, maybe they just were looking for excuses not to have to treat you?...

...as well as emotional and/or psychological ones...and then vice-versa all the way back around. In an ER setting, however, the seeming "mental" issues actually *are* automatically less serious than any "physical" issues unless something is indicating possible bodily harm to the patient or to someone else. That does not make it okay for any ER staff to be dismissive, of course, but neither do the staff in the psych ward stitch wounds or set broken legs.

Beyond any of that, however, is the fact that the various types of doctors typically tend to push patients from one field-of-practice to another rather than interacting and even working with others doctors to get down to root causes and conditions in order to try to find comprehensive solutions...but then yesterday I was quite impressed when a friend's GP actually called a mental-health facility to help arrange for my friend's initial appointment there.

My doctors never dismissed my physical illnesses as mental issues. But for several separate symptoms several separate doctors on several separate occasions have done one test and then left me to suffer with the problem.

Well, I had a broken arm dismissed once. The doctor in my school said "stop making things up".