A friend around you suddenly said one day “I have depression”. Your first reaction is not shocked, Ta was not very normal before, how can you get depression? Is Ta joking? Fake it? So, can depression really be faked?
Depression can indeed be “faked”.
Depression is characterized by low mood, loss of interest or lack of interest, and feeling that everything is meaningless, with a gradual decrease in energy that lasts for about 2 weeks or more, and not only does it not get better after resting, but also has the possibility of getting worse. By combining all the above information, the doctor can determine that the patient is already suffering from depression.
It is entirely possible for a person to be diagnosed if he or she intentionally plays the role of a depressed person and relies only on the measurement scale and the subjective judgment of the consulting doctor.
Some people may think: “Ta can’t fool the machine by pretending to be a depressive person, but a brain scan will do. There are studies that say that people with mental illness have shadow abnormalities in their brains. “The brain areas associated with depression are in the prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, hippocampus and amygdala. But the experiment found that the results were not so good either. Although there is evidence that some depressed patients do have abnormalities in their brains, this does not mean that all depressed patients have abnormalities in their brains. Moreover, patients with brain abnormalities do not always suffer from depression. In other words, detecting brain abnormalities does not necessarily equal depression, and depression does not necessarily equal that the brain will have abnormalities.
In addition, as early as 1973, psychologist David Rosenhain has done experiments, recruited eight people to do a fake psychiatric patients, after training, let them “send” themselves to 12 mental hospitals. As a result, all but one of the subjects were diagnosed with “schizophrenia”. More interestingly, the doctors and nurses did not find them to be falsely mentally ill after the hospitalization. This shows that it is not easy to prove that you are sick or not sick.
This was the “Rosenhain experiment” that attracted a lot of attention in psychology and psychiatry at that time. This experiment also proved that depression can be “faked”. If the person has a clear understanding of the diagnostic criteria for depression, and if he or she is conscious, it is usually very difficult to detect.
Finally, I would like to remind you not to pretend that you are depressed and not to suspect that others are not depressed, but to respect yourself and others and to seek help from your doctor.
References.
[1] Luo Aihua. Depression [J]. Oriental Medicine. 2020,8: 254
[2] https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/101049141