I was writing something earlier about the way that professionals have responded to self harm in the past. It made me think that the assumptions that people make and they way that people assume attention seeking and manipulation at the root of everything kind of feels like professional gaslighting.
The Wiki definition is : a form of manipulation that seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or in members of a targeted group, hoping to make them question their own memory, perception, and sanity. Using persistent denial, misdirection, contradiction, and lying, it attempts to destabilize the target and delegitimize the target's belief.
Maybe people don't specifically hope to do those things, but isn't that the end result and the method of getting there?