Munchausen Syndrome

Medical, psychiatric, and/or developmental disorders can be falsified in a variety of ways. Know the warning signs often missed by clinicians.

What do you include in your differential diagnosis if you suspect Munchausen syndrome? Take the quiz and learn more.

Should malingering be considered more likely than factitious disorder when a patient exhibits pseudologia fantastica? What condition persists for longer than 3 months, accompanies a disease process, and is associated with a bodily injury that has not resolved over time? These questions and more in this interactive quiz.

Although acute pain typically resolves on its own with little need for intervention, for some persons pain persists past the point where it is considered an adaptive reaction to injury.

The doctor’s role is to go beyond the obvious and to detect subtle determinants. Good diagnosticians have been trained to look beneath the loud symptom and consider underlying factors.

November/December 2009 Special Report: Forensic Psychiatry

Patients who exaggerate, feign, or induce physical illness are a great challenge to their physicians. Trained to trust their patients’ self-reports, even competent and conscientious physicians can fall victim to these deceptions.

Respecting the article “Abortion Trauma Syndrome” by Arline Kaplan, I would note the irony of the claim that this syndrome is “conceived by anti-abortion activists to advance their cause,” given the obvious pro-abortion attitude of everyone associated with Kaplan’s article.

Because numerous diseases- infectious, endocrinological, metabolic, and neurological, as well as connective-tissue disease-can induce psychiatric and/or behavioral symptoms, clinicians need to distinguish these neuropsychiatric masquerades from primary psychiatric disorders, warned José Maldonado, MD, the director of Stanford University’s Psychosomatic Medicine Service.

Mr A was desperate. He was about to lose yet another job, not because he was at risk for being fired, but because his lying behavior had finally boxed him into a corner. He had lied repeatedly to his colleagues, telling them that he had an incurable disease and was receiving palliative treatment. . .

Fliege H, Grimm A, Eckhardt-Henn A, et al. Frequency of ICD-10 factitious disorder: survey of senior hospital consultants and physicians in private practice. Psychosomatics. 2007;48:60-64.

"There must be some way out of here," said the joker to the thief."There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief. . . .""No reason to get excited," the thief, he kindly spoke,"There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate,So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late."From "All Along the Watchtower," Bob Dylan

The following cases highlight some of the challenges clinicians face when treating patients in whom malingerling is suspected. One key aspect of these evaluations is not overlooking signs or symptoms that point to serious illness.

Few phenomena in medicine aremore confounding than the diagnosesinvolving deception:malingering, Munchausen syndrome,Munchausen by proxy (MBP), and factitiousdisorder.

Recent discoveries in neuroscience have ramifications for all aspects of clinical and forensic practice, including diagnosis, treatment, and testimony in civil and criminal justice cases.

The assessment of malingering presents a significant challenge for mental health clinicians.

Five words that are guaranteed to annoy your patientwith a diagnosis of psychogenic movementdisorder (PMD) are It's all in your head.It's the worst thing you can say, said Katie Kompoliti,MD, associate professor of neurological sciencesat Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.

Dr Steven King provided an interesting summary of complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) in Psychiatric Times (Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, June 2006, page 9). We felt it would be useful to provide some additional observations on the relationship between CRPS type I and psychological causes of pain.

It can be difficult to determine whether unusual, paroxysmal behavior represents a seizure or a nonepileptic event. Patients with convulsive, clonic movements may, in fact, be experiencing psychogenic events.

While many parents fear that strangers might kill their children, a parent is actually more likely to be the perpetrator. This column focuses on preventing the tragedy of maternal filicide.

While dementia is marked by such cognitive deficits as disorientation, memory loss and changes in intellectual functioning, these are not the symptoms that cause the most distress to caregivers.

Neurotechnologic devices are proving themselves in clinical medicine. Many of these devices offer several distinct advantages over traditional pharmaceutical-based therapies: their effects are reversible, they are often cheaper than pharmaceuticals, and they solve therapy adherence issues. "If a problem occurs, you can turn off the device; or if the disease evolves over time, you can dynamically adjust the device," explained Ali R. Rezai, MD, chairman of the Center for Neurological Restoration at the Cleveland Clinic.

Somatoform disorders (disorders that are not fully explained by a medical condition or mental disorder) may require psychiatrists to consult with physicians.

Pediatric psychosomatic research shows that emotional, behavioral, and psychiatric symptoms are found more often in children and adolescents with chronic illnesses than in healthy children.

Psychiatrists specialize in mental phenomena, but this special expertise does not confer license to ignore the additional information that can be gathered from physical signs.

About 25% of patients seen in epilepsy clinics and monitoring units who do not respond to antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) have received a misdiagnosis.1-3 The eventual diagnosis for most of these patients will be psychogenic nonepileptic seizure (PNES)1,4-a somatoform conversion disorder. It is treatable, but diagnosis, delivery of the diagnosis, and management present significant challenges. A major barrier to care has been the stigma associated with the label "psychogenic."

Psychiatrists can play a vital role in determining whether or not a patient will be a good candidate for an organ transplant. Using a case vignette, Dr. Garton explains how she helps a transplant team make the best possible decision.