Forensic psychologists and doctors are faced with many obstacles when assessing a patient for a disorder. One of these obstacles is determining whether or not the person is malingering: the forging of mental or physical symptoms to either avoid a negative consequence or to gain a positive one. Malingering is very difficult to determine because everyone experiences disorders differently. It can also be confused with factitious disorder, which is similar in that both people with factitious disorder and those that malinger attempt to convince others that they are ill when they are not, but those with factitious disorder are compulsively compelled to act this way whereas those who are malingering are doing so for a beneficial reason. Medical…show more content… In a study by Mason, Cardell and Armstrong, they reference a research study previously done by G. Hay (1983) which uncovered that five out of the six patients he followed that had been identified as malingering, were actually schizophrenic and had not been lying about their symptoms (2013, pg. 53). Furthermore, it is important to identify malingering because the cost of it for insurance companies annually is $150 billion (Mason, et al., 2013, pg. 52). Along with costly, it is harmless to treat someone for an illness that they don’t have especially with dangerous side effects to certain medications. It is also costly for the government to provide people with benefits for disabilities that they do not have. Lastly, it is costly and time consuming to declare someone incompetent to stand trial because that will only postpone their trial until they are treated and deemed fit to stand…show more content… The study included ninety-eight healthy students who were asked to write one true statement about how they were feeling and one fabricated statement. Luria et al hypothesized that those who were malingering would have higher letters, take longer to write, and have higher angle measurements, that people would have different writing profiles and that truthful writing and malingering writing would be able to be differentiated (pg. 850). Participants wrote their statements on a digital tablet that evaluated their writing by detecting size (width, height and length), angle, and duration. They uncovered three different types of writing profiles; the first profile was large in size, duration and angularity, the second profile was higher in duration and medium in velocity, size and angularity, and the last profile was medium size and a longer duration. (pg. 853). For those with the first profile of writing, malingering writing was 5% wider than truthful writing. For those with the second profile, malingering writing had higher length, height, velocity and angularity. Lastly, for the third profile, malingering writing had a higher duration, which indicted hesitation as they were writing. While Luria et al’s study results
