Denial

In plain words

Denial is the "this is not happening" response. A person gets frightening news, notices a sign of their own drinking, or senses that a relationship is ending, and acts as if the fact were not there. It is common, and for a short time it can give a person room to adjust. It is a problem when it stops them acting.

Where the idea comes from

Psychoanalytic writing uses two German words: Verneinung, "negation" or denial, and Verleugnung, "disavowal", usually a stronger refusal to accept reality. George Vaillant's ranking of defences places denial at level I, the pathological level, with "psychotic denial or disavowal" listed separately; milder, everyday denial belongs to the same family. The ranking draws on the Harvard Grant Study and appears in Adaptation to Life (1977). DSM-IV (1994) carried a tentative axis for defences in which denial and rationalisation fall under "disavowal".

The Wikipedia article on denial describes it in terms of insisting that something is not true "despite what may be overwhelming evidence". It cites health research linking denial to delays in treatment: a paper on delayed treatment of heart attack (Ornato and Hand, 2014) and another on delayed detection of breast cancer (Rivera-Franco and Leon-Rodriguez, 2018). Those papers were not opened for this entry, so this is a pointer, not a finding.

How it shows up

Denial is rarely a flat "no". More often it looks like minimising ("it was nothing"), changing the subject, getting very busy, or agreeing with the facts in words while carrying on exactly as before. It is a different thing from lying: the person usually believes some of what they say.

On TwentyThird, Oneli may notice that a topic a member returns to is always described as settled. It will not call that denial, since only the member can know what they are avoiding, and it will not try to force a recognition.

What it is not

Denial is not a stage everyone passes through, and it should not be assumed whenever someone disagrees with you. Hope and denial are not the same, and a person who refuses a diagnosis may have good reasons to want a second opinion. The term "denialism", used for rejecting scientific or historical facts, is a separate usage and is not covered here. If someone you know seems to be ignoring a serious risk to their health or safety, the response is to encourage care from a clinician; if there is danger now, contact local emergency services. In the EU, call 112.