Posted by baseball55 on July 12, 2016, at 19:08:10
In reply to Re: Outrageous Psychologist » Lamdage22, posted by SLS on July 11, 2016, at 15:55:51
When therapists suspect that being mentally ill has advantages for a patient, they call this "secondary gains." As in, what might one gain by staying ill (consciously or unconsciously)? Since the secondary gain is often unconscious or unexamined, most good therapists would not confront a client about this until they had reached a point of trust and self-awareness to look at this possibility.
Facticious disorder usually is applied to situations where people fake physical symptoms (sometimes even cause symptoms by harming, poisoning self) to get medical attention. It's also called Munchausen syndrome. There is also a condition called Munchausen by proxy, where a parent will make a child ill to get medical attention. Obviously, anybody who would do this has some serious psychological issues.
But it is very different from, say, conversion disorder where people experience very real symptoms for which no physical cause can be found and that are probably caused by emotional stress. (Used to be called hysterical symptoms).
In factitious disorder, the person knows that they are not really ill and deliberately manipulates physicians because they might only feel safe in a hospital or they grew up with a sick parent or sibling who absorbed all the family's attention.
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> I know the "condition" that he is describing, but I can't remember the name of it (facticious disorder?). His suspicions could be right. His suspicions could be wrong. But I can't see how it is at all helpful to verbalize his suspicions to you with so little time invested in you. At the very least, there is no way that he could know you well enough to understand how his words would be received by you. Without more information about you, he could be doing more harm than good. This is dangerous.
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> I don't like it.
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> - Scott
poster:baseball55
thread:1090332
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20150512/msgs/1090457.html