When anxiety overshadows everything else: the diagnostic challenge of multi-condition experience (New research by Umio)

For the 2.3 million people in the UK living with Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD) - and millions more around the world - accessing healthcare can feel like walking into a room already scripted. One where any new symptom, such as palpitations, fatigue, dizziness, or pain, is pre-read through the lens of anxiety.

Too often, this doesn’t lead to better care. It leads to something else ...

• Medical Gaslighting (MG) – when a person's symptoms are dismissed or denied
• Diagnostic Overshadowing (DO) – when those symptoms are explained away by a pre-existing mental health label

My recent research with Nicky Lidbetter and Dave Smithson from the UK’s leading anxiety charity Anxiety UK investigated these phenomena in the lives of people with GAD.

It asked two questions:

1. What happens when your body tells you something’s wrong, but your diagnosis speaks louder than your voice?
2. What issues arises when your real lived experience (#RLX) spans multiple conditions, but systems ask you to narrow it to one?

To answer these, I spoke with both people living with GAD and General Practitioners (GPs) in primary care, where MG/DO often happen first.

The research offers the first empirical insight into the scale and forms of MG/DO experienced by people with GAD in UK healthcare, revealing a shared awareness and willingness among both patients and GPs to address these issues.

Encouragingly, both groups express a clear demand for new tools, such as pre-appointment aids, diagnostic supports, and bias-aware decision resources, that could improve consultation quality, reduce harm, and lead to better health outcomes.

But what’s the wider issue here?

• It’s about what happens when diagnostic categories flatten complexity, overriding the texture of real lived experience.
• It’s about how systems split physical and mental health, even as they remain deeply entangled in the realities of people’s lives.
• And it’s about how the word “anxiety” - meant to describe a condition - can become a barrier, sometimes even a reason to retreat from care altogether.

At stake then is not just clinical accuracy, but trust, recognition, and the conditions for people with GAD to be seen, heard, and treated as whole.

If you work in primary care, mental health, complex condition research, or have lived experience of MG/DO, I’d love to hear your experience and thoughts of what can be done.

View the paper on Octopus on the link, or drop me a comment below and I will send you a copy.

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