How do you fool a psychiatrist?

Question

Are they able to be fooled by someone faking being a bit mental?

For the record i have never and hopefully will never see a psychiatrist in my life.

i'm merely asking a question, afterall this is yahoo questions!!

DOESANYONE ACTUALLY READ THE WHOLE QUESTION AND ADDITIONS???

geeez get off ya high horses you people im only asking a flippin question!!!

i have no interest in visiting a flippin psychiatrist!!

I'm asking IF......in a totally meterphoric way!!

Answer 1

Well, it depends.

In my experience, I have been to two good therapists (out of two), and they've been pretty perceptive at drilling through the mess and being able to discern patterns.

I know that I was "helping" them, not trying to hinder them, and it was long-term one-on-one therapy.

Someone mentioned the experiments done in 1973, where researcher David Rosenhan wanted to test this concept. So he made up a symptom that could be read as a schizophrenic hallucination (hearing a few "words" or noises, but no other symptoms), and then he and some compatriots tried to get themselves admitted to different psychiatric wards around the country.

They were successful in fooling the shrinks and spent an average of almost three weeks in a ward before being released. Interestingly, about a third of the patients locked up with them and queried about them identified these peopel as "sane" -- whereas the shrinks failed to recognize their sanity. Sometimes even innocuous behavior was written up in the case files as signs of psychological imbalance.

Obviously this paper (printed in Science magazine) pissed off a lot of shrinks. So Rosenhan offered a follow-up match: He warned a specific hospital that he would send a number of patients to them over the next three months, to try to get admitted, and their job was to properly identify them. They complied. in the next three months, the hospital identified (out of close to 200 patients) around 40 to be imposters and another 40 to be suspected of being imposters..

As you might have surmised, Rosenhan had laid a nice trap: He sent no one at all to the hospital. So everyone viewed as an imposter had an actual potential psychological disorder.

Writer Lauren Slater repeated this experiment within the last ten years sometime. If her text is 100% accurate, she was able to check herself into the emergency room and be "treated" and -- while she was not kept for observation -- she was in many cases prescribed medication to alleviate the supposed hallucinations.

Note that Rosenhan's experiment occurred over 30 years ago, and the face of psychiatry has changed since people were routinely locked up in wards. Even Slater's experiment shows more the difficulty that modern-day ER practitioners have in diagnosing people quickly and efficiently while trying to process a large number of people for a myriad of causes:

1. Patients commonly expect a quick fix (and thus are prescribed meds of some sort).

2. There is a desire to avoid liability -- it's better to treat for a potential cause and have nothing bad happen, than to not treat at all a potential cause and have someone do something horrible.

3. The doctor assumes that the patient in fact is working WITH him and not against him -- that he is not lying about his symptoms. There's a level of trust there not just with the patient for the doctor, but the doctor for the patient -- that the patient wants real help and is telling the truth, as much as possible. A diagnosis is only as good as the data it is made with.

To veer off this topic a bit into a different area, such as criminal insanity: In this case, there is an assumption that a criminal might be pretending to be insane in order to avoid punishment. So the psychiatrist is testing the inmate for consistency. While we've all heard horror stories about people "pretending to be crazy," any psychiatrist/psychologist worth their salt and who is healthily skeptical can detect the majority of these cases, where the convict's behavior and story does not match up. Especially, the more experience a shrink has, the better they will be at detecting inconsistencies -- they'll know what to look for.

Any shrink that is easily fooled is either (1) rushing for some reason to a diagnosis, (2) too accepting of people's stories at face value, or (3) not well educated/experienced.

So to me, it would be a matter of circumstance, personality type, and background for a shrink to be easily fooled by a patient's story. And the longer the shrink sees the patient, the more likely it would be for the shrink to detect inconsistencies, if any exist.

Answer 2

Choose a mental disorder of your own choosing and study everything you can about this disorder(i.e. symptoms, behavior resulting from the disorder, etc.).

Also, look up the disorder in the DSM-IV-TR. Figure out how you can exhibit the minimum criteria needed to be diagnosed with your chosen disorder.

Practice, practice, practice. Take an acting class if you can.

I have no doubt that you will be able to fool a psychiatrist/psychologist.

Mental Health Practitioners cannot truly know what you are thinking. They can only gauge things about you by what you give them via speaking and body behavior.

Answer 3

Sorry, psychiatrists label even the sanest human beings. learn instruct that a thoroughly sane guy or woman can flow to work out a psychiatrist,and , the psychiatrist will locate something incorrect and label them...........then all of it is going into your everlasting checklist and others stick to the chief, and after years of this crap, you will grow to be what ever the label mentioned you're. Then they are going to be good, and declare that each and all and sundry alongside. See, how that works? the different element is , you DO choose some style of help.........reducing isnt healthful or popular , or something good............. inspite of the justifications you could or will possibly no longer have began doing it.

Answer 4

Sipi is WRONG there are those who attempt to fake it to escape punishment, or who want a mental diagnosis to get benefits.
As far as how to do it...
Study the disorders you want to convey, and you might fool some. Most are well trained to detect fakers, fools, blighters, and so on.
The training I have had so far is rather simple. There are three kinds of clients--people with no condition but merely need help sorting things out, those who think they are ill, and somewhat are, or are not, and finally, the ones people often think are the only kinds that come to seek help or have it imposed by a magistrate or pushed by family:
Nutter
Quite Odd
Barking Mad
Completely F'd up.
Each of the above has subclasses of diagnoses.
Which one do you wish to be?

Answer 5

There was a study a few years ago where they sent sane people into phsychiatric units to see if they would be accepted. They were told to be themselves, just to say they were hearing voices. They were all diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Another journalist tried the same thing to do an undercover report. The other patients realised he was a reporter but the staff didn't.
The staff are human and can be lied to and fooled just the same as everyone else; but they are trained to look for 'concealing behaviour', which we would call an indication of lying.

Answer 6

In part, the answer is that 'it depends on in what way or which area' that you want to fool him or her.

Doctors of any type, are only human and are capable of making judgements of error.

it also helps if the person attempting to do 'the fooling' knows either something about about the subject, or knows someone personally they can model their self on.

Yup, I also agree, answers are helped greatly when the reader actually takes the time to 'read the question properly' (something I've failed to do at times ~ having been eager to answer).

Sash.

Answer 7

I feel sorry for you trying to fool any one never mind a Psychiatrist, whats it all about, money, security, or are you really sick in the head, any way best of luck from a friend.

Answer 8

Now that is completely stoopid... You go to a psychiatrist at expensive price and you only want to fool the guy?

You know what? I don't think you are fooling them... Whatever you do, its you who is fooling yourself... Because you've wasted your time and money on this gimmick...

Answer 9

be yourself, they always want to find a problem when there really is not one. They want you to think that you are crazy so that they can keep on scheduling appts and prescribing medicine to keep you coming back, so that eventually you can qualify for one of those cheqs and then they know that you will be able to afford that copay that seems to get larger each visit

Answer 10

be one yourself.

They have YEARS of post graduate training, so to be able to fool them, you'd need at least that.
However, they also have standardized tests that are pretty hard to "cheat" on... a good Psych will see a liar a mile away, and be trained well enough to not let on that they know you are faking.