Malingering
| Malingering | |
|---|---|
| Classification and external resources | |
| ICD-10 | Z76.5 |
| ICD-9-CM | V65.2 |
| MeSH | D008306 |
Malingering is the fabricating of symptoms of mental or physical disorders for a variety of "secondary gain" motives, which may include financial compensation (often tied to fraud); avoiding school, work or military service; obtaining drugs; getting lighter criminal sentences; or simply to attract attention or sympathy. It is not a medical diagnosis. It falls under the broader scope of illness behaviour. Malingering is different from somatization disorder and factitious disorder. Failure to detect actual cases of malingering imposes a substantial economic burden on the health care system, and false attribution of malingering imposes a substantial burden of suffering on a significant proportion of the patient population. According to the Texas Department of Insurance, fraud that includes malingering costs the U.S. insurance industry approximately $150 billion each year. Other non-industry sources suggest it may be as low as $5.4 billion, ironically suggesting that insurance companies are over inflating the seriousness of the problem to divert more law enforcement towards health insurance fraud.
The symptoms most commonly feigned include those associated with mild head injury, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and chronic pain. Generally, malingerers complain of psychological disorders such as anxiety. Malingering may take the form of complaints of chronic whiplash pain from automobile accidents. The psychological symptoms experienced by survivors of disaster (post-traumatic stress disorder) are also faked by malingerers.
Many dishonest methods are used by individuals feigning symptoms of malingering. Some of these include harming oneself, trying to convince medical professionals one has a disease after learning about its details (such as symptoms) in medical textbooks, taking drugs that provoke certain symptoms common in some diseases, performing excess exercise to induce muscle strain or other physical types of ailments, and overdosing on drugs.
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