Four in five people diagnosed with an autoimmune disease in the United States are women. This statistic is at the center of a viral internet meme now circulating on TikTok, Threads and Instagram with tens of thousands of likes that makes a more blunt claim: that women are making themselves sick by being too compliant and that “being a bitch” is the cure.
Science does not support the cure. But the frustration behind it points to something real.
What does stress autoimmune research actually show?
This meme is loosely based on real scientific studies. A 2018 study found that clinical identification of stress-related disorders was significantly associated with an increased risk of developing autoimmune diseases. In another study conducted in 2020, it was reported that PTSD patients died 58 percent more than those without this mental disorder.
It has long been noted that in addition to systemic inflammation, there is also a link between psychological stress and increased cortisol production.
What the meme misses is the gap between correlation and personal prescription. No peer-reviewed study has examined whether self-described “people pleasing” causes autoimmune attacks, or whether adopting a more assertive nature reverses them. The claim that “love and light” causes IBS, or that setting firmer personal boundaries allows the body to heal itself, is an extrapolation from social media and not clinical evidence.
The meme reaches its cultural moment through its current arrival. Economic research measuring self-reported well-being shows that women’s happiness levels have declined over the past two decades.
Economists and commentators have documented the persistence of unequal domestic and emotional labor burdens, the disproportionate impact of pandemic-era caregiving on women, and existing issues surrounding medical misogyny, which describes how clinical staff treat women’s pain through dismissal and research limitations. The concept that continued pleasurable behavior causes health problems because social training requires physical sacrifice exists as a valid scientific hypothesis.
However, it is much more complicated than a TikTok format allows. Autoimmune diseases involve genetic, hormonal, environmental and immunological factors that no behavioral change can eliminate.
Researchers have proposed several mechanisms why women develop autoimmune diseases at higher rates: hormonal differences, dosage effects of X chromosome immune genes, and the documented tendency for autoimmune symptoms in women to be underrecognized and delayed in diagnosis. Stress is a contributing variable in a complex whole, and not the controlling one.
