If you file a claim for long term disability, one of the things the doctors and insurance representatives look for is whether or not the issues that you are suffering from are real or falsified – and if they aren’t real, if the falsification constitutes factitious disorder.
What is factitious disorder? This is a real psychological condition where someone is driven to fake the symptoms of an illness, either in themselves or another person, even when there is no logical reason to do so, such as to gain a monetary award.
How the DSM-5 Diagnoses Factitious Disorder
In order to be officially diagnosed with factitious disorder, there are several criteria that you are required to meet.
- You need to have faked the signs or symptoms of a condition, injury, or disease in order to deceive. These faked symptoms can be psychological or physical, and they can be self-imposed or imposed on another person.
- You need to have presented yourself (or someone else) to other people as being injured, impaired, or ill even though you are not.
- You need to engage in this kind of deception in an almost impulsive way, faking sickness or harm even when there is nothing for you to gain from doing so.
- The deceptive behavior that you engage in cannot be better explained by a different psychological condition like delusional disorder.
When doctors evaluate individuals for this kind of disorder, they are expected to specify whether the deceptions they engage in are about them personally (“I’m a schizophrenic.”) or another person (“They are a schizophrenic.”). Additionally, they will attempt to determine whether the behavior is something that has occurred only once (a single episode) or happened two or more times (recurrent episodes).
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