Most of us can recall a time when we pretended to be sick to reap the benefits that go along with illness. By playing sick, we gained sympathy, care, and attention, and were excused from our responsibilities. Though doing so on occasion is considered normal, there are those who carry their deceptions to the extreme. In this book, Dr. Marc Feldman describes people’s strange motivations to fabricate or induce illness or injury to satisfy deep emotional needs. Doctors, family members, and friends are lured into a costly, frustrating, and potentially deadly web of deceit. From the mother who shaves her child’s head and tells her community he has cancer, to the co-worker who suffers from a string of incomprehensible "tragedies," to the false epilepsy victim who monopolizes her online support group, "disease forgery" is ever-present in the media and in many people’s lives. In Dying to be Ill: True Stories of Medical Deception, Dr. Feldman, with the assistance of Gregory Yates, has chronicled this fascinating world as well as the paths to healing. With insight developed from 25 years of hands-on experience, Dying to be Ill is sure to stand as a classic in the field.
In the classic edition of this outstanding book, originally published in 2004, Dr. Marc Feldman explores the bizarre cases of real patients who feign or even self-induce illness. Playing Sick? chronicles the devastating impact of illness hoaxes, including factitious disorders, Munchausen syndrome, Munchausen by proxy, and malingering. Based on years of research and clinical practice, Playing Sick? provides the clues that can help professionals, family members, friends, and patients themselves to recognize these diagnoses, avoid invasive procedures, and understand elusive motives. Dr. Feldman offers practical advice to get emotionally ill patients the help they need. This classic edition is essential reading for physicians, social workers, and anyone interested in why and how individuals fabricate illness.
Stranger Than Fiction: When Our Minds Betray Us is a spellbinding invitation into the world of the human mind that will change our perceptions of mental illness forever. Despite the growing body of scientific discoveries into the nature of the human mind, the stigma attached to mental illness remains deeply entrenched in the general public's consciousness, the product of inaccurate information and centuries of mystery. In a simple conversational style, two distinguished clinicians, Drs. Marc and Jacqueline Feldman, discuss the complexities of mental disorders and their treatment. Using the metaphor of the lie of the mind, a disorder in which a person's thinking becomes unintentionally distorted, the authors approach mental illness from the perspective that these disorders are merely extreme variations of universally shared thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Stranger Than Fiction removes the artificial division separating the mentally ill from the general public and demystifies symptoms that often seem bizarre. On this journey through the human psyche, the Feldmans use vivid, enlightening, and often poignant cases from their own professional experience that dramatically illustrate how psychiatrists help patients liberate themselves from the mental conditions that imprison them. The reader is invited into therapy sessions and hospital rooms and receives an insider's view of the difficulties that each therapist confronts when treating disturbed patients. The authors show how clinical decisions often rely more on educated hunches than medical certainties and reveal that the practice of psychiatry is as much an art as it is a science. After finishing this unforgettable book, readers will better understand the true nature of mental illness and witness the joy that even the smallest triumph produces in patients and caregivers alike.
A new, hopeful pathway to understanding children’s trauma and providing effective interventions to build healthier communities Each year at least a billion children around the world are victims of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) that range from physical abuse to racial discrimination to neglect and food deprivation. The brain plasticity of our most vulnerable makes the adverse effects of trauma only that much more damaging to mental and physical development. Those dealt a hand of ACEs are more likely to drop out of school, have a shorter life, abuse substances, and suffer from myriad mental health and behavioral issues. The crucial question is: How do we intervene to offer these children a more hopeful future? Neurobiologist and educator Dr. Marc Hauser provides a novel, research-based framework to understand a child’s unique response to ACEs that goes beyond our current understanding and is centered around the five Ts—the timing during development when the trauma began, its type, tenure, toxicity, and how much turbulence it has caused in a child’s life. Using this lens, adults can start to help children build resilience and recover—and even benefit—from their adversity through targeted community and school interventions, emotional regulation tools, as well as a new frontier of therapies focused on direct brain stimulation, including neurofeedback and psychedelics. While human suffering experienced by children is the most devastating, it also presents the most promise for recovery; the plasticity of young people’s brains makes them vulnerable, but it also makes them apt to take back the joy, wonder, innocence, and curiosity of childhood when given the right support. Vulnerable Minds is a call to action for parents, policymakers, educators, and doctors to reclaim what’s been lost and commit ourselves to our collective responsibility to all children.
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