I once saw a text on the Internet: a teenager, because he didn’t want to go to school, pretended that he was depressed, hoping that the doctor would give him a leave order and never have to go to school again. So the question is, can pretending to be depressed really fool the doctor?
It’s not easy, but not impossible, to fool a doctor and get a diagnosis of depression when you go to the hospital with a complaint and insist that you are depressed.
I believe many people know that the two most typical symptoms of depression are persistent low mood and diminished interest or lack of pleasure, accompanied by corresponding changes in thinking and behavior. The clinical manifestations are depressed mood, slowed thinking, reduced speech and movement, and accompanied by physical symptoms such as decreased appetite, decreased libido, and sleep disturbances.
Although severe mental illness can not pretend, but if you have very strong acting ability, and have deep acting skills, and familiar with the diagnostic criteria of depression, deliberately pretend that you have depression, put yourself in a depressed mood, repeatedly emphasize their insomnia, can not eat, and even have the impulse to die …… Can doctors really not be deceived? Yes, even professionals can hardly tell the truth from the falsehood in a short time.
This is because psychiatric diagnosis is not the same as other diagnoses. The symptoms are mainly based on self-reporting, plus the doctor’s clinical experience and clinical observation, as well as a combination of a series of scale tests, and the scale is filled out by you. In other words, it is the “human being” who is the decisive factor in the entire diagnosis process, not the machine that does not lie as an aid to the diagnosis of disease. However, sometimes machines may have a certain rate of misdiagnosis, not to mention psychiatric diagnosis, which explores the black box of the brain.
Of course, if a professional psychiatrist can be with the patient every day, with time, there is a high chance to recognize each other’s performance.
Finally, I would also like to ask those who have the idea of pretending to be depressed to think about what is the point of your pretending? Is it really necessary?
References.
[1]Zhang Hongliu,Wang Tianfang,et al. A recent 10-year literature analysis of Chinese medical evidence of depression [J]. Journal of Beijing University of Traditional Chinese Medicine. 2005,28(3): 79-81