How Many People Fake Being Sick?

Being ill is, in general, a rather unpleasant experience, and many people go to great lengths to stay healthy. There are arguably, however, certain benefits to being ill. These include:

1. Getting a sick leave from school or work
2. Getting an early pension
3. Getting more financial compensation after an accident
4. Getting more positive attention from partners or parents
5. Being able to make disability claims to an insurance company
6. Getting a lighter sentence in a lawsuit
7. Getting access to certain drugs, such as opioid painkillers

For these reasons, and perhaps others, perfectly healthy people sometimes fake being ill. There are different levels of faking illness, from slightly exaggerating existing symptoms to completely making up an illness. As the initial diagnosis of many types of illnesses typically relies heavily on self-reporting by the patient, it is often fairly easy to fake being ill, at least for some time. Since faking illness can be associated with significant costs for society (e.g., faking illness to make disability claims or get an early retirement), it is important to conduct psychological research on how many people fake being ill.

A New Study Sheds Light on How Many People Fake Illness

To determine how big the problem of people faking illness really is, an international team of researchers conducted a new study based on survey data from the Netherlands (Merten et al., 2023). In the study, just published in the journal Psychology & Neuroscience, the team analyzed data from 975 adults from the Netherlands who had answered several questions about faking illness in an online interview. The interview contained questions about what percentage of Dutch people fake illness, whether the participants ever faked illness to achieve a goal, and whether they knew people who had faked illness in the past.

Surprisingly, Many People Fake Being Ill

Many medical professionals believe that faking illness is something that happens only very rarely, but the results of the study paint a very different picture. The participants in the study said they believed about one in every three people (31.2%) do fake illness to achieve a goal. Participants also reported that 22.7% had a person in their family who had faked illness to achieve a goal in the past; 24.9% knew someone among their friends who had faked illness; and 15.4% knew someone in their neighborhood who had done so. The highest percentage was reported for colleagues at work (38.9%). About 14.3% of participants in the study even admitted that they had faked illness themselves in the past, with 55% having faked physical symptoms, 7.4% having faked mental symptoms, and 37.5% having faked both physical and mental symptoms. Most people who had faked illness themselves felt guilty about it (80.6%), but a few also felt that it was thrilling (16.5%).

So how high is the actual percentage of people faking illness? The 14.3% who said they had faked illness themselves in the past probably underestimates the real occurrence rate, as some people may not willingly admit that they had done something so morally questionable. The 38.9% who knew work colleagues who had faked sickness may potentially be an overestimation, as some people may have wrong assumptions about their co-workers' willingness to do their jobs. The true rate may be close to the base rate of 31.2% reported by the participants in the study, as this percentage is also close to what has been found in previous studies in other countries.

Taken together, faking sickness to achieve goals is clearly not as rare as experts once believed: About one-third of people do it. As this points to a larger problem in society, doctors and psychotherapists should have these findings in mind when assessing patients.

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