Diagnostic overshadowing among people with mental illness: views and experiences of emergency department staff

Background/Objectives: One factor suggested to contribute to the health inequalities suffered by people with mental illness is discrimination by health care professionals. One form of this discrimination has been described as ‘diagnostic overshadowing’. This refers to the process by which a person with a mental illness receives inadequate or delayed treatment due to the misattribution of their physical symptoms to their mental illness. The concept of diagnostic overshadowing as it affects people with learning disabilities has been investigated over the past 20 years but has only recently received attention as a…