The truth behind compulsive liars: how dishonesty can be sign of a mental health problem
- Pathological lying can be a symptom of mental illnesses such as narcissistic personality disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, anxiety and depression
- US President Donald Trump and novelist Dan Mallory are among public figures to have been accused of it
In this social media age, where people look to portray their best selves online, it is easy to fall prey to exaggeration, the omission or distortion of inconvenient truths, and even outright lying.
The news media brims with stories of people falling from grace after they are called out for lying.
Democratic Party politicians in the United States, some of their Republican Party rivals and psychologists regularly call US president Donald Trump a habitual, pathological liar. A recent New Yorker article exposed novelist Dan Mallory, who writes under the pseudonym AJ Finn and penned the hugely successfully thriller The Woman in the Window, as a compulsive liar. Among his litany of fabrications was lying about having brain cancer and inventing the deaths of family members.
Police labelled American citizen Mikhy Farrera Brochez, recently accused of leaking the names of more than 14,000 HIV-positive people in Singapore, a pathological liar. He was found to have lied about his HIV status and to have used fake credentials to obtain teaching jobs.
And Netflix is planning a series based on the spectacular fall from grace of Anna Sorokin, a Russian-German socialite in Manhattan charged with grand larceny following claims she pretended to be a trust-fund millionaire. As a 2018 article in New York Magazine told it, Sorokin confided to acquaintances that she was an heiress from Germany waiting on her trust fund before she could proceed with plans to open an art space in the city.
