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Everyone lies. Everyone tells “little white lies” throughout the day (even if it’s something as simple/innocent as “Hey, I’ll be there in five minutes” when it actually takes you ten minutes). But what about the people that have taken it to a new extreme?
It’s important to note that there are two distinct categories for these types of everyday liars. One is a “compulsive liar”. These are the liars that lie because of getting themselves into what’s essentially an addiction. They lie because it has become such a reflexive habit that they do not even realize they are doing it much of the time. Many of these people grew up in an environment and/or have endured different types of abuse and trauma that it becomes extremely difficult to ‘unlearn’ this kind of habit. Health experts state that this type of lying essentially takes advantage of the brain in a similar way that gambling does — it takes advantage of that ‘reward vs risk’ system in the brain, which is why it is such a difficult habit to break.
The second type of liar is a pathological liar. These are the liars that lie, knowing they are lying, and do so often to cause some type of harm to someone else (or to make themselves look better, often at the expense of others).
The ICD-10, what is used for archiving and billing purposes relating to the medical field does not have a code for “pseudologia fantastica” (the official…
