This effectively reduces the target's capacity to criticize or respond independently. An effective way to neutralize the possibility of criticism is to undermine others' conception of themselves as an autonomous locus of thought, judgment, and action. Some individuals cannot tolerate disagreement with or criticism of their worldview from important individuals in their life (e.g., friends, loved ones, romantic partners). Some psychologists are not encouraged by this increased international awareness of the dangers of gaslighting, warning that overuse of the term could dilute its potency and downplay the serious health consequences of such abuse. Dorpat recommended non-directive and egalitarian attitudes and methods on the part of clinicians, : 225 "treating patients as active collaborators and equal partners". Other experts have pointed out ways in which the values and techniques of therapists can be harmful as well as helpful to clients (or indirectly to other people in a client's life). : 31–46 In a 1997 case study, Lund and Gardiner reviewed a case of paranoid psychosis in an elderly female who was reported to have recurrent episodes, apparently induced by the staff of the institution where the patient was a resident. The gaslighting behaviors of the spouse provide a recipe for the so-called ' nervous breakdown' for some suicide in some of the worst situations." ĭorpat also cautions clinicians about the unintentional abuse of patients when using interrogation and other methods of covert control in Psychotherapy and Analysis, as these methods can subtly coerce patients rather than respect and genuinely help them. "Therapists may contribute to the victim's distress through mislabeling the reactions. They conclude that both husbands and male therapists may contribute to the women's distress, through not only mislabeling the women's reactions but also through the continuation of certain stereotypical attitudes that reflect negatively on the affected wife. The article "Gaslighting: A Marital Syndrome" (1988) examines certain male behaviors during and after their extramarital affairs, as well as the effect of those behaviors and associated attitudes on the men's spouses. "Gaslighting" is occasionally used in clinical literature but is considered a colloquialism by the American Psychological Association.
Oxford University Press named gaslighting as a runner-up in their list of the most popular new words of 2018. The American Dialect Society recognized the word gaslight as the "Most Useful" new word of the year in 2016. However, there were only nine additional uses in the following twenty years.
The New York Times first used the common gerund form, gaslighting, in Maureen Dowd's 1995 column. The term is now simply defined as "to make someone question their reality." According to the American Psychological Association, the term "once referred to manipulation so extreme as to induce mental illness or to justify commitment of the gaslighted person to a psychiatric institution but is now used more generally". Gaslighting was largely an obscure or esoteric term until the mid-2010s, when it broadly seeped into English lexicon. The term is derived from the 1944 film Gaslight, in which a husband uses trickery to convince his wife that she is mentally unwell so he can steal from her. Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman, and Joseph Cotten in the 1944 film Gaslight