Medicated, Not Believed: What the Short et al. (2023) Stalking Study Found

Medicated, Not Believed: What the Short et al. (2023) Stalking Study Found
Before they were stalked, the overwhelming majority of victims in this study had no mental health diagnosis at all. After they were stalked, 95% did. That’s the headline finding, and it should be read as an indictment, not a coincidence: victims who were telling the truth about being hunted and terrorized were, in large numbers, handed a psychiatric label and medication instead of protection.

Stalking is often treated as a lesser crime — something short of “real” violence, easy to dismiss as an overreaction or delusion.

A 2023 UK study puts hard numbers behind why that framing is dangerous. Fear, hypervigilance, and panic in someone being actively stalked are not symptoms of a disordered mind; they are an accurate read of a real threat and an adaptive survival response.

This study shows how often the healthcare system got that backwards — pathologizing the victim’s response instead of confronting the danger causing it, rather than believing what the victim was saying from the start.

The Study
Researchers Emma Short, Leanne Hanney, Sam Taylor, Andy Guppy, and James Barnes surveyed 105 self-identified stalking victims about their physical and psychological health before and after being stalked, along with their experiences trying to get help from healthcare providers. The results were published in Health Psychology Update in 2023.

The Core Findings
Before being stalked, the picture was unremarkable: 86% of respondents reported no health concerns at all, and only 30% had any pre-existing mental health diagnosis.

After being stalked, that picture flipped dramatically:

• 74% developed new health problems
• 23% sustained physical injuries directly from the stalking
• 95% reported psychological or mental health difficulties — up from 30% before. That’s not a small increase. It’s the difference between roughly one in three people having any diagnosed mental health concern, and nearly everyone having one, following a sustained campaign of harassment and fear.

The Part That Should Concern Everyone

Sixty percent of victims accessed healthcare services specifically because of the stalking. Of those:
• 66% saw their GP
• 38% accessed counseling or mental health support
• 22% went to victim support or specialist stalking services
• 8% engaged domestic violence services
• 6% ended up in A&E

Here’s the problem: of the people who disclosed their situation to a health professional, only 33% felt that professional actually understood what they were going through. Nearly a quarter of cases resulted in a referral to counseling — often without addressing the actual, ongoing external threat causing the distress.

In other words, a large share of victims were funneled toward mental health treatment for their fear, anxiety, or hypervigilance — symptoms that were a rational response to being stalked — without the stalking itself being meaningfully addressed.

Given that other research (Monckton Smith et al., 2017) found stalking behaviors present in 94% of a sample of 358 homicide cases, treating stalking-induced fear as a standalone psychiatric issue rather than an urgent safety signal is a serious clinical blind spot.

Why This Matters
This study adds to a pattern researchers have started calling medical gaslighting or the pathologization of victims: treating the psychological aftermath of real, ongoing danger as a disorder to be medicated, rather than as evidence that something threatening is genuinely happening.

When 95% of stalking victims end up with a mental health diagnosis but only a third feel understood by the professionals treating them, the system is arguably responding to the symptom while missing the cause.

My recommendations are straightforward: families, communities, police, and healthcare professionals need real-world training to recognize stalking specifically (not just generic “anxiety” or “distress”), tailored support across multiple care settings, and referral pathways that include safety planning and information about legal options — not just a prescription pad.

Source: Short, E., Hanney, L., Taylor, S., Guppy, A., & Barnes, J. (2023). A survey study of stalking victims’ experiences of the health-related effects of stalking and their experiences of engaging with health care practitioners. Health Psychology Update, 32(1), 27–37.