Factitious Disorders: A Case Study

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Diagnoses in medicine involving deception are some of the most difficult phenomenon’s to detect: factitious disorder, malingering, Munchausen syndrome, and Munchausen by proxy. As a starting point for diagnosis and treatment, doctors rely on reported symptoms in order to accurately detect the problems with the patients. When patients give misleading information, consciously or unconsciously, doctors and physicians are unable to accurately diagnose the patient (Dyer & Feldman, 2007). This phenomenon is commonly known as factitious disorder, which the “DSM-IV offers two inclusion criteria: physical symptoms are intentionally produced, and the patient’s motivation is to assume the patient role” (Krahn, Li, & O’Connor, 2003). Factitious disorders …show more content…
“Factitious disorder is an uncommon, but probably underdiagnosed, condition associated with considerable morbidity, mortality, and health care expenditure” (Sutherland & Rodin, 1990). In order to accurately diagnose FD, physicians and other medical professions must be able to maintain an organized and complete collection of patient medical records with detailed information. The diagnosis of such disorders often requires a team approach and the involvement of the primary care physician has extremely important effects for young children, especially when women and health-care workers are diagnosed with FD. Medical skills alone are normally not adequate for diagnosis or to detection of FD. In order to successfully detect deception and FD, there needs to be sufficient evidence to support such diagnoses. These include interview assessments, medical documentation, and non-medical investigations that could help support the diagnoses; however some psychometric investigations such as a symptom validity test can detect illness deception. In order to better manage FD, medical personnel will benefit greatly from the involvement of non-medical factors such as social neuroscience, occupational health, and clinical psychology. The ability to diagnose patients with FD could be accomplished more efficiently if …show more content…
Of this group, 95% were female, with an average age of 33 years, and 68% of the subjects had health-related jobs. While another study by Carney and Brown of 42 patients, 76% of them were female, their mean age was 34 years, and 50% of them were in the medical field (Krahn et al., 2003). “The profile of the young female health care worker with factitious disorder is widely accepted” (Krahn et al., 2003). In a study over a 10-year period, eight individuals were diagnosed with a FD. Out of the 1.2 billion people in India, it is estimated that about1.3 million people have a FD (Dahale, Hatti, Thippeswamy, Harish, & Chaturvedi, 2014). In a 1-year study by Baur and Boegner, they found five of the 1538 patients diagnosed as having FD. “All patients had similar, characteristic psychopathological features including self-discharge, aggressive behavior, pseudologia phantastica, and hospital wandering” (Bauer & Boegner, 1996). Baur and Boegner along with many other researched concluded that FD appeared to be more prevalent than they had thought. However, with the difficulty of diagnosing people with a FD many people are left undiagnosed because of the extensive medical

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