My Psychiatrist Ignored My Autoimmune Disease and Misdiagnosed Me With Anorexia Nervosa

Hi everyone. I’m sharing this because I can’t stay silent anymore. What happened to me is exactly why I distrust psychiatry, and why people like me get harmed instead of helped.

It started with subtle symptoms that slowly escalated: fatigue that never went away, joint and muscle pain, dizziness, headaches, photosensitivity, and nausea. I lost weight not because I wanted to, but because my body literally couldn’t process food properly. Around this time, I was prescribed vitamin D (Hidroferol/Deltius) — a standard supplement that’s supposed to help. Instead, it triggered severe reactions: persistent nausea and vomiting, tremors, worsening fatigue, inflammatory acne, hair loss, and an overall collapse of my energy. My body was screaming that something was wrong.

I went to my psychiatrist for help, hoping for understanding or at least basic investigation. Instead, he ignored all physical evidence. He looked at me, at my thin frame, and said I had anorexia nervosa. No tests. No careful examination. Just a label. He dismissed my vomiting, my weakness, my chest pressure, and my rashes as “symptoms of the eating disorder.” Even when I tried to explain that the vitamin D was literally making me ill, he insisted it was psychological.

Soon, I was sent to a hospital to be treated for an eating disorder I didn’t have. The staff there refused to run further medical tests. They focused solely on “correcting my eating behaviors” while my body continued to deteriorate. I was extremely weak, often dizzy, sweating excessively, and experiencing chest pain and difficulty breathing. Yet the system insisted it was all mental. The stress, forced meals, and invalidation compounded the physical damage — they were treating me as a psychiatric problem instead of investigating what was truly happening.

During this time, I experienced a wide range of physical symptoms that were ignored or misinterpreted: severe fatigue that didn’t improve with rest, sudden drops in energy, feverish sensations without actual fever, dry mucous membranes, persistent thirst, joint swelling and pain, stiffness in the mornings, muscle weakness, migraines, photosensitive rashes, and episodes of dizziness and imbalance. My hands would swell and hurt, my skin would flare with heat or stress, and I struggled with basic daily activities like lifting my arms to shower or wash my hair. I even had episodes of chest pain and difficulty breathing that felt like pleuritis or inflammation of the chest wall, yet psychiatry framed them as psychosomatic.

Months later, when I was finally evaluated properly, my ANA test was positive, indicating an autoimmune disease, likely lupus or an undifferentiated connective tissue disease (UCTD). Suddenly, everything made sense. My fatigue, muscle weakness, photosensitivity, joint pain, rashes, migraines, autonomic dysfunction, and chest inflammation were not imagined. They were very real symptoms of a systemic autoimmune condition — not a psychiatric disorder.

Looking back, it’s terrifying how quickly psychiatry can erase reality. Once I was labeled with anorexia nervosa, my voice, my experience, and my body stopped mattering. The system treated me as if I were manipulative, lying, or simply “in denial.” The truth is, my body was sick, and the neglect, invalidation, and psychiatric labeling almost made me sicker.

This experience has left lasting scars — not only from the disease itself but from the trauma of being disbelieved and mislabeled. I became afraid to seek medical help, constantly second-guessing myself, wondering if anyone would ever listen to what my body was telling me. I was treated like a story, not a patient.

To anyone reading this who feels dismissed or gaslit by psychiatry: trust your body. Your symptoms are real, and your pain matters. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s “all in your head.” Psychiatry did not save me. It almost destroyed me. I hope that by sharing my story, someone else who is being ignored will find the courage to push for real medical care before it’s too late.