Intentionally Ill’ - A Case Report of Malingering in a Tertiary Care Hospital

The word malingering derives from the Latin word “Malum” that means bad or harmful, and in this context refers to the bad intent of the offender’s actions. It is regarded as fraud and may lead to charges of perjury or criminal fraud. In a clinical setting, various presentations include imitation of pain, insistence on the presence of bleeding, alleging the presence of PTSD-like symptoms, hallucinations, and/or delusions offering a psychosis like picture. “Psychosis” is a term that covers a wide range of clinical presentations making it attractive to malingerers, since inconsistent symptoms may be seen as simply atypical. Such presentations also often lead to a diagnostic dilemma as clinicians tend to group malingering along with factitious disorder and dissociative disorders. Establishing that a patient has a conscious primary motive behind feigning the illness is a key distinction between malingering and those other disorders. We hereby report a case of a 36-year-old male presenting with hallucinatory behavior, auditory hallucinations, delusions, dysphoria, before his marriage date which on detailed evaluation elucidated several inconsistencies between the reported and observed- symptoms, level of function and psychological test results.