ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the wide range of mental illnesses that patients simulate in the interest of gaining attention and nurturance. Physical illnesses that are created or conjured comprise the largest number of factitious disorder cases, but some persons with factitious disorder prefer instead to mimic psychological illnesses. In this variant, a person pretends to have an emotional problem such as grief, or a major mental illness such as depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder. It is one of the greatest ironies in all of medicine that a real mental disorder, factitious disorder, can be diagnosed when a person without a mental illness deceives others into believing that he or she has one. Although reports of factitious disorder with psychological symptoms alone are infrequent, when such cases do arise, the traits that are manifested typically resemble those seen in Munchausen syndrome.
