Dr. Ingela Thuné-Boyle
Health Psychologist
Online Practice

For many people, especially those living with an invisible or poorly understood condition, seeing the doctor can feel like an empty, even humiliating experience. At its best, medicine has always been a collaboration built on inquiry, listening, and the belief that every symptom tells a story worth investigating. Yet today, particularly for those with chronic, complex, or invisible conditions, appointments can instead feel like empty rituals; brief, dismissive, and devoid of g

Living with a chronic illness reshapes nearly every part of a person’s life, and friendships are no exception. While companionship and connection are fundamental human needs, they can become difficult to sustain or initiate when someone is navigating unpredictable symptoms, physical limitations, or the emotional weight of long-term illness. What many healthy people may take for granted - meeting for coffee, keeping up with texts, attending social events, or spontaneously maki

Living with chronic illness often requires a level of self-advocacy that goes far beyond what most people experience in healthcare. It means repeatedly explaining your condition, asserting your needs, correcting misunderstandings, and sometimes challenging authority. When the stakes are your health, dignity, and quality of life, speaking up for yourself is not optional, it’s essential. And when something goes seriously wrong, making a formal complaint is sometimes the only wa

For many living with chronic illness, the word acceptance can feel loaded, even offensive. It may carry the sting of resignation, suggest defeat, or imply a passive tolerance of pain and limitation. To be told to "accept" one’s condition can sound dismissive, especially when that advice comes from those who do not grasp the daily realities of chronic illness. And yet, paradoxically, acceptance is also a cornerstone of psychological flexibility and emotional well-being.

Intermittent reinforcement is an unpredictable and inconsistent pattern of rewards or responses (i.e. a pattern where affection, approval, or connection is unpredictably given and withdrawn). It has profound psychological and physiological consequences, particularly when experienced in close relationships. Common in emotionally abusive, manipulative, or unstable environments, this behavioural pattern keeps individuals locked in cycles of confusion, self-doubt, and emotional d

Living with a chronic illness often involves not only physical pain or fatigue but also the ongoing challenge of explaining your condition to others. For many people with chronic conditions, one of the most exhausting and isolating aspects is the repeated need to clarify, justify, or defend their limitations to healthy people who simply do not understand.

Health psychology is a vital and evolving field that explores how psychological, behavioural, and social factors influence physical health and illness. While traditionally associated with chronic illness, pain management, and health behavior change, health psychology also plays a critical role in addressing trauma and grief. These profoundly human experiences, which are often undetectable by medical tests, significantly impact both mental health and physical well-being.

Medical gaslighting is a term used to describe situations in which healthcare providers dismiss, minimize, or misattribute a patient’s symptoms, concerns, or lived experiences, often suggesting that the problem is psychological or not real. This can involve telling patients their symptoms are “all in their head,” exaggerating, or caused by stress, despite clear distress or evidence to the contrary.

Grief is an intensely personal, unpredictable, and nonlinear experience. It touches every corner of a person’s life - mental, emotional, physical, spiritual - yet society often treats it as something to be managed quickly, quietly, and within an arbitrary timeframe. When individuals fail to conform to these unspoken rules of "acceptable mourning," they may be met not with empathy, but with judgment, discomfort, or outright criticism - a phenomenon known as grief shaming.

Experiencing a major bereavement is among the most painful and destabilizing events a person can face. When that loss is traumatic, unexpected, violent, or profoundly significant, it can leave deep psychological scars. For someone already living with a chronic illness, the impact of traumatic grief is compounded, creating a complex intersection of physical vulnerability and emotional devastation. Navigating this dual burden can feel like trying to heal two wounds at once

Grief is a natural reaction to loss, but it doesn’t follow the same path for everyone. When a death is sudden, violent, or deeply...

'Medical trauma' refers to a patient's psychological and physiological response to a negative or traumatic experience in a medical...

Medical gaslighting is a subtle yet deeply damaging phenomenon in healthcare, where a patient's symptoms or concerns are dismissed, minimized, or attributed to psychological causes without appropriate investigation. Often rooted in implicit bias, power imbalances, or systemic issues within the medical system, this behavior can lead to misdiagnosis, delayed treatment, and a loss of trust in healthcare providers.

The mind-body connection refers to the link between our thoughts, emotions, and behaviours, and our physical health. This relationship is bi

The connection between narcissistic abuse, trauma, and chronic illness conditions, underscores the profound impact of emotional suffering on

Some people with a chronic illness or with distressing physical symptoms may have experienced trauma in their lives, either as a direct result of their illness or at a previous point in their lives. Ongoing childhood abuse, for example, has been shown to be related to ill health in adulthood, where those who experienced a rough childhood are more likely to be diagnosed with a chronic illness later on in life.

Grief is usually associated with a single event such as the death of a loved one. However, in chronic illness, grief is also very prevalent despite the fact that no one has died. It can be an ongoing issue and is usually associated with many types of losses. Despite this, people don't often associate chronic illness with grief but the realization that life will never be what it was, and the future is not what you thought it would be, is a major loss.

Health Related Quality of Life (HRQoL) consists of at least four broad domains that can affect or be affected by one's condition and/or treatment: physical, psychological (including the behavioural), social and spiritual functioning.

I've read a few articles lately about what people describe as 'medical gaslighting'. What's usually being referred to here is a tendency...

While healthy individuals are currently experiencing a huge amount of uncertainty and even hardship as a result of the Corona virus, their lives will eventually get back to some kind of normal - maybe even a new normal - but with far less uncertainty. Most will eventually re-establish their routines and feel some sense of control over their lives. However, for those of us with a chronic illness, that sense of future uncertainty was always there and continues to cause havoc wh