Dr. Ingela Thuné-Boyle
Health Psychologist
Online Therapy

The way we describe illness is not neutral. It shapes how conditions are understood, how patients are treated, and how individuals make sense of their own symptoms. Few terms illustrate this more clearly than mind–body syndrome and psychosomatic illness. While they are sometimes used interchangeably, they reflect very different underlying assumptions about health, causation, and care. At first glance, both terms attempt to capture the relationship between psychological and ph

Historically, many poorly understood illnesses were attributed to psychological causes when medicine lacked adequate biological explanations. Patients with complex or under recognized conditions were often dismissed as anxious, hysterical, or overly focused on their symptoms. This legacy has contributed to ongoing mistrust and even trauma among some patients and is now often described as medical gaslighting.

Living with multiple or overlapping medical conditions often means navigating a health-care system that was never designed with complexity in mind. Each symptom brings you to a different specialist; each specialist focuses on their organ, their discipline, their small slice of the body. In theory, this should lead to comprehensive care. In reality, it often leaves people feeling unseen, misinterpreted, or caught in the crossfire of contradictory recommendations. For many, the

There is a particular kind of suffering that arises not only from physical symptoms, but from the invalidation of those symptoms. Many people living with chronic illness or undiagnosed conditions find themselves in a distressing limbo: feeling profoundly unwell while repeatedly being told by doctors that they are fine because their test results fall within normal ranges. This experience of being caught between undeniable symptoms and an absence of medical validation can be de