It could also affect competency determinations. Whether pathological liars are aware of the falsehoods embodied in their stories has substantial implications for forensic psychiatry practice-for example, it could help determine how a court may deal with pathological liars who provide false testimony while under oath. “It is questionable whether it is always a conscious act and whether pathological liars have control over their lies.”
Unlike other forms of lying, pathological lying appears to be unplanned and impulsive, he explained. the pathological liar may become a prisoner of his lies, the desired personality of the pathological liar may overwhelm the actual one.” “In pathological lying, telling lies may often seem to be an end in itself. These lies are often “woven into complex narratives,” he pointed out. “Rather, it may be that psychiatrists simply know little about the subject and have difficulty recognizing the phenomenon,” he said.ĭefining the concept is a crucial step in analyzing the concept of pathological lying from a psychiatric viewpoint, and Dike described it as repeated lies told over a number of years for which an external reason is not easily discernable.
#Compulsive liar disorder manual#
He believes as well that it is time for psychiatrists to assess whether pathological lying “represents only a symptom of a pre-existing psychiatric disorder or is a coherent enough entity” to be included as a separate diagnosis in APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM).ĭike and his colleague Ezra Griffith, M.D., a professor of psychiatry and African-American Studies at Yale, addressed these issues at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law in October.ĭike emphasized that the paucity of literature references and studies on pathological lying-which is sometimes referred to as pseudologia phantastica-should not be interpreted to mean that psychiatrists rarely encounter it in clinical practice.
Pathological lying has rarely appeared on the psychiatric radar screen in recent years, remaining a poorly understood concept with serious ramifications, particularly for forensic psychiatrists.Ĭharles Dike, M.D., a forensic psychiatrist and clinical instructor in psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine, maintains that psychiatrists need to pay attention to pathological lying so they are able to inform the legal system about whether pathological liars should be held responsible for their behavior.
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