Most of us over the course of our lives have committed the act of “faking.” As kids, we just didn't want to go to school for fear of being bullied or maybe we didn't want to take that grueling math test. We would make up any excuse not to go to school by pretending to be sick. As an adult, you felt like taking off to secure a three-day weekend, concocting and quoting to your boss that you had a fever. Unfortunately, in our society there have even been selfish people who fake an illness, such as breast cancer, and make money from funds that sympathetic people have invested for the benefit of their personal obligations. and a more worrying disorder: factitious disorder. Malingering, which is not considered a psychological disorder, is commonly identified and referred to as sufferers who wish to gain something monetary by faking an illness. Factitious disorder is often misdiagnosed and overlooked. It is defined as the intentional action of misrepresenting an illness and there is no obvious benefit except the inner need to draw attention to oneself and gain emotional sympathy. There are several subdivisions of factitious disorder. They include psychological factitious disorder (PsyFD), physical factitious disorder (PhyFD), combined psychological and physical factitious disorder (ComboFD), Munchausen syndrome, and Ganser syndrome. The person claiming to have an illness usually lacks empathy and will do anything to embellish the symptoms of an illness or disease in many different ways. In factitious psychological disorder (PsyFD), the individual will mentally and emotionally assume that they are suffering from a mental illness. ..... middle of paper ......under the detection radar. This can ruin the credibility of a person who is one day truly ill, like in the fairy tale of The Boy Who Cried Wolf. I hope more cases will be investigated and documented for the future of society. Fake troubles waste time and money on those who are ill, not on those who are excited by the gestures of sympathy they receive. Works Cited Hamilton, James C. and Holly N. Deemer. “Excessive reassurance-seeking as self-regulatory perseveration: Implications for explaining the relationship between depression and illness behavior” Psychological Inquiry Vol. 10, No. 4 (1999): 293-297 JSTOR Web. November 12, 2013. Samaan, Zainab, Erin Hoh and Glenda MacQueen. “Factitious disorder presenting as type 1 diabetes mellitus” BMJ Case Reports (2009). ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3027606/Web. November 12. 2013.