By Max Pearson

An anonymous woman has spoken out against treatment she received for what was believed to be a mental disorder, only to find out years later that was not the case.

The woman was originally diagnosed with a psychological condition known as Acute Vaginismus, which causes the vagina muscles to forcibly remain shut when touched and can make even the use of tampons extremely painful.

She was treated with exposure therapy, designed to separate her apparent psychological fear of pain by inserting progressively larger objects, ideally proving to her psyche that there was nothing to fear. But as she later realised, this was not what she needed.

“It was discovered five years ago that I didn’t have this condition. I actually had a physical deformity. But they’d not done a physical examination. They just assumed it was this condition.”

“It’s basically trained my brain to associate anything in that area with massive amounts of pain.”

“The treatment they gave me to combat this problem actually gave me the condition they were trying to treat.”

She attributes the failure of her doctors to detect the true problem to a range of factors. The main one being that she rarely saw the same healthcare professional more than a few times. This made it hard for any kind of consistency in her treatments to develop.

“Stop being polite.” She says to anyone in her position. “If you’re being passed around just say I want to see the same person!”