this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2026
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Makes sense, staff has relatively limited contact with patients compared to the other patients, and outside of research, what healthy person would get themselves admitted to a psychiatric hospital on purpose?
It does point to how difficult psychiatric diagnosis is, though. Though other medical fields tend to have the opposite problem, they tend to treat patients with real medical, non-psychological issues as pretenders or people with psychosomatic issues if it's not immediately obvious that they have a real medical issue.
Patients lying about symptoms have been a medical issue for centuries. It is the main topic of Baudrillard's philosophical analysis on simulacra and simulation. Think about it, a soldier who doesnt want to be deployed starts simulating symptoms of a disease to be discharged. How would you catch him, can you? The answer seems straight forward, until you scrutinize it in detail. Neither military or medical knowledge actually have an answer. The kid who doesn't want to go to school says he has a headache and a tummy ache. How do you validate another's conscious and sensory experience? Hypochondriacs affirm to develop every disease they hear about. People under stress feel and have somatic symptoms akin to physical diseases, even when functionally nothing is wrong with them. Etcetera. Disease and diagnosis are not so simple and straight forward, not even when talking about bodily functions.
It's why objective testing parameters are so damn important.