Malingering: Why it is so much easier to fake Schizophrenia—and most other conditions—than it is to fake Multiple Personality

Multiple personality can be faked, but it is harder to fake than schizophrenia or almost any other mental condition. Why do people think that multiple personality is easy to fake? Because they see it faked by actors in movies.

But the actor in a movie has a script. If the character has twenty personalities, then the writer probably made lists of the characteristics of each of the twenty personalities, so that the script did not inadvertently have any inconsistencies. If each of the twenty personalities has twenty unique characteristics (behavioral quirks, age, what they do and do not remember, etc.), then there are four hundred details about these personalities that have to be kept straight.

And the movie usually doesn’t provide a detailed backstory for each of the twenty personalities, but in real life each personality does have its own story, and a malingerer would have to keep these twenty backstories straight.

And each of the twenty personalities has a consistent relationship with each of the other nineteen personalities. Some are friends. Some are enemies. Some can read each others minds. Some can’t. Some never heard of each other. Etc. These relationships must be maintained with perfect consistency.

Now, compare the above with schizophrenia. The symptoms are relatively nonspecific. If you hear a voice, does what it says make sense, and is it consistent with what your voice said two weeks ago? It doesn’t matter. Inconsistency might even be seen as being more genuine. In short, the diagnosis of schizophrenia does not require any specific symptom or much consistency. All a malingerer has to do, essentially, is not make sense, sincerely. (I am not ridiculing schizophrenia. It is very serious. All I am saying is that it does not have to demonstrate the specificity, complexity, and consistency of multiple personality.)

Is it possible to fake multiple personality? Yes. Is it easy to fake? No. And it is much harder to fake than schizophrenia and most other conditions.