#COMPULSIVE LIAR VS PATHOLOGICAL LIAR MANUAL#

Khatri’s decades of weaving elaborate stories – to the extent of posing as a government employee and a doctor – had led to him committing frauds. In 2005, Mahender Khatri*, 42, was forced by his family into the cabin of Dr Rakesh Pal Sharma, a Kurukshetra-based counsellor who headed the department of psychiatry at Chandigarh’s Government Medical College & Hospital. Pathological lying is a symptom of several personality disorders such as antisocial personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder.Ĭompulsive lying can be a symptom of co-morbid conditions like anxiety, depression, and BPD. However, there’s a marked difference between the two. The terms pseudologia fantastica (or pathological lying aka mythomania) and compulsive lying are often used interchangeably. “As an ICD, kleptomania is repeated engagement in stealing – mostly to release anxiety,” says Dr Chandrasekhar. She was so ashamed, she doubled over and pleaded for help. He recalls a patient who, on her first visit, stole a paperweight from his office. “Kleptomaniacs have tremendous self-loathing and even depression, because they are at the mercy of impulses,” says Mumbai-based psychiatrist Dr Pavan Sonar, who has treated 30 cases of kleptomania. This compounds the patient’s internal struggle.

Yet those with conditions such as kleptomania (also an ICD) and compulsive lying – which is rare, but co-morbid with anxiety and depressive disorders – find themselves in a hostile environment.ĭespite the person’s clear need for help, prevailing attitudes are very intolerant, says Dr RC Chandrasekhar, a senior professor of psychiatry at NIMHANS for over three decades, who now consults at Bangalore’s Samadhana Counselling Centre.ĭr Chandrasekhar recounts the time a woman was brought to his centre by her in-laws and parents, who’d taken to hitting her “to set her right”. Twitter was awash with appreciation recently when Michigan-based web developed Madalyn Parker’s request for a mental health time out got an empathic response from her boss. Celebrities at home and abroad discuss battles with bipolar disorder, eating disorders, and ICDs such as drug or alcohol addiction. Kleptomania is the rarest ICD after pyromania.ĭeepika Padukone has talked about depression. The five stages of a typical ICD are Urge, Tension, Action, Guilt, Relief

#COMPULSIVE LIAR VS PATHOLOGICAL LIAR MANUAL#

Kleptomania is an impulse control disorder (ICD).Īs per the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM 5) – the universal criterion for classification of mental disorders – an ICD is a complete lack of behavioural or emotional self-control.Īddictive behaviours are ICDs.

But for many like him, suffering from an impulse control disorder (ICD) can be lifelong agony. He has not stolen anything in seven years, he says. The therapy included multiple group sessions with his family and two best friends, where the therapist explained what kleptomania was and worked to convince them that he wasn’t just a thief. It got so bad that I wanted to either chop my hands off or commit suicide.”ĭandekar pulled through with 18 months of psychiatric counselling, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and medication. “My family didn’t want to go out with me. I had lost most of my friends by then, because they realised I had been taking things from their homes,” Dandekar says. “It took that degree of public humiliation for me to seek help. People were upset and suspicion against him had mounted. Some of the pens that had gone missing were expensive. Dandekar was eventually ushered into his manager’s cabin at his last workplace. “Whether it was the office, a cousin’s house, or a party, I’d flick mundane stationery even though I didn’t want to, and risk going downhill in the eyes of my friends and family.”Īnd go down he did. I dreaded waking up every day, knowing what was to come,” recalls the 38-year-old, now a Hyderabad-based area sales manager with an online retailer.

“It was a tick that’d be the death of me if I didn’t deal with it. Pencils, erasers, sharpeners, notepads, paper clips, even stapler pins – over the next nine years, Dandekar would stockpile stationery he never really wanted, and certainly did not need. A few days later, he noticed a stapler lying in the lounge area of the call centre where he worked, and pocketed it. When Prathamesh Dandekar* was 22, he stole a ballpoint pen from a colleague’s desk.

Compulsive liar vs pathological liar