Hypochondria, Facetious Disorder, and Identity Disturbance

Post Reply New Topic

I am wondering if we have any hypochondriacs here. I myself am not one. I am not really worried about having any diseases or mental disorders too much. Also, by hypochondria, I'm including people who are trying to find the disorder that fits them the best even if they don't worry about having it; this would fall into the rubric of identity disturbance that's a part of borderline personality disorder or facetious disorder (Munchausen syndrome). I'm also including malingerers, who feign illness for financial gain or to avoid obligations.

I know many people here consider Asperger's syndrome to be an integral part of their identities. I don't. For me it's wholly pragmatic. Asperger's syndrome simply explains many of the social problems I am facing more descriptively than calling it shyness or anxiety. It is a way of gaining self-knowledge so that I can more effectively meet my life goals, especially socially. It also opens me to meet other people who have faced similar challenges. If another syndrome better explains my problems, by all means, I'd accept that. I'm not emotionally attached to my diagnosis. I do not take it personally if people are mistaken about AS, but I do try to correct factual errors so that they may have a more proper understanding of it and the autistic spectrum in general.

I know at least one aspie who seems to have a bit of facetious disorder and identity disturbance—and a little malingering for financial gain.

Can you explain further what you mean?

I assume that by facetious you mean factitious disorder, one form of which is Munchausen syndrome, in which someone deliberately simulates an illness (physical or psychological) in order to assume the "sick role" and receive whatever benefits are associated with that role.

If someone is "trying to find the disorder that fits them best", how is that different from your description of Asperger's as explaining the social problems that you face, if the individual truly does experience those difficulties?



By this, do you mean that this person appears to be pretending to have Asperger's when they in fact do not?

Same here. I thought it was AS at first, but once I researched my current dx's and brain abnormalities, I found that it was already covered by them.

I wake up everymorning and I find the first thing I need are my glasses. I don't consider that I am "Visually impaired", it is just how it is. Same thing when I put my hearing implant on (after eating, I don't like to hear myself eat cereal) and so forth. I don't need the idenity of a disorder to define myself; but it is helpful to know why many things happen the way they do for me, hence I am still here and still doing some research into my specific brain abnormalities.

Generally I am against deaf culture and the creation of a AS culture, specifically because it co-opts the identity that I have worked so hard to create for myself. People see my implant and walk up to me and start signing, which doesn't make me happy, as I put 18 (I am 20) years of my life learning the english language and becoming articulate in it. The culture creates the assumption that others are the same if they display the "charaterstics" of it. I never volunteered to be in deaf culture and want no part of it, but nevertheless, am forced to assume that idenity in people's eyes.

this Hypochonria is, in my opion, an attempt by others to create an culture on something that will "give" themselves an idenity

Yes, I do mean facitious disorder; I didn't notice the spelling difference and simply found it odd that facetious (i.e., in jest) would also mean fake. The difference between facitious disorder and malingering, as I understand it, is that malingerers are not malingering out of some psychological insecurity; they simply want easy money or to avoid a responsibility. They don't really care about playing the sick role and will only play it long enough to get what they want. A person with facitious disorder feels more liked, more cared about, more attended to, and simply more of a human being when pretending to be sick. I guess a person with a borderline personality disorder-esque identity disturbance would not be consciously aware of feigning an illness; they would read the symptoms and come to believe that describes them because their sense of self is already so shakey and empty.

I guess the difference is one of degree. I didn't self-diagnose myself for one thing; my mother instigated the whole thing when I was in high school. I eventually accepted that many of the symptoms were accurate descriptions of me and decided to use this knowledge to help myself. People with an identity disturbance will find themselves in many illnesses. They will selectively recall particular times when they fit that symptom. They will then self-diagnose themselves with the disorder and go to the support groups, complain some, feel woe-is-me-I-can't-do-anything-about-this and never try to actually make something of themselves. They will just use these disorders as excuses for maintaining the status quo.

This person accurately identified themselves as having Asperger's syndrome, in my opinion. However, this person has self-identified with many psychiatric disorders before and has used psychiatric disorders they admit they don't have (and claim the psychiatrist admitted as much as well) to stay on Social Security disability income.

It seems to me that it would be too easy to 'identify' with assorted disorders - especially of the personality disorder variety - given the degree of co-morbidity implicit in the various disorders.

I was tempted to make a facetious comment about having every disorder in DSM-IV TR except hypochondriasis, but then I realised how lame it would sound. So I thought I would say it anyway.

It is interesting to note that some tentative speculations about where diagnostic criteria might move forward in the next few iterations (DSM-V, DSM-VI and DSM-VII), which are considering replacing the taxonomy approach to that of a dimensional one, can be found here: http://www.appi.org/book.cfm?id=2292

As regards 'disorder identities' - that can be a bit of a bind. If I do find a way to get credibly evaluated for AS/ASD and the assessment comes up with a confirmatory diagnosis then I certainly would not want to go around broadcasting this fact to everyone. Also, the "malingerer's angle" would have no import for me. In the UK it is unlikely that someone with AS/ASD would have any particular 'entitlements', especially if like me, it is only debilitating in terms of stressful social situations, a certain amound of 'idiosyncratic' or 'eccentric' gestures, activities, etc, a loathing of certain types of loud noises and the inability to focus on six conversations at once, whilst juggling seventeen tasks in the space of 30 seconds.

I'm wondering how an individual could determine whether they are somehow suffering from an identity disturbance or genuinely autistic / Asperger's. The way I see it, something like AS cannot really be faked since by definition it manifests in early childhood. I know I was a proper little Aspie as a young girl (really, how many children actually get their parents called in for a conference because their daughter won't stop talking about Star Wars?), but since the diagnosis did not exist when I was younger, nobody really knew what to do with me. I was classified as a "behavior problem", ADHD, socially anxious, and dysthymic. None of these labels really describe me as well as some form of autism. I suppose I have a hard time wondering WHY anyone would bother faking AS or trying to adopt its characteristics if one did not have a natural predisposition to such characteristics. I mean, there are a lot of other disorders out there MUCH more conducive to getting attention / sympathy / a sense of belonging if that's what a person is after.

Asperger's is the closest fit I've found that makes sense for me, even though I probably don't meet the diagnostic criteria. The best description I ever heard of generalized neurological issues comes from Bill Choisser'ssite. He likens it to the way a shotgun damages things--lots of little pellets go all over the place. Some parts of your brain are affected, some aren't. Trying to nail things down to enough names to fit into the DSM may not be possible. If there are 1000 different characteristics that can be used to describe a brain, and they all have a more or less analog continuum of strength, then the number of possible permutations is so large that the DSM would fill the universe.

So hypochondria may, in part, be part of our desire to categorize a large set of things into a small set of categories, even when the category doesn't fit.

Absolutely true of course, even if the apparently AS characteristic behaviours were attributed to other things of the day eg "behavioural problems, temper tantrums, aloof and distant from peers, seeking the company of adults rather than other children, etc"..

Same here, except ADHD did not exist as a diagnostic category in the 1970's.

Exactly. In fact having any sort of 'diagnosis' could be a real liability when it comes to getting a job, taking a course of further/higher education or in a social setting as part of a 'self-disclosure' exercise.

The only tangible 'benefit' of a diagnosis is as an explanatory framework for why so much has gone wrong and why life has been a consistent pattern of failure, disappointment and frustration., in spite of average to above-average intelligence and fairly considerable effort to improve things in life.