HealthCare Professionals are not quite sure if pathological lying should be classified as a disorder or if it is just a sever character weakness. This can be accompanied by mental problems such as:
• Antisocial Personality Disorder
• Bipolar
• Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
• Attention Deficit Disorder
Although, healthcare professionals are unsure what to classify pathological lying as, they still treat it as a disease with cognitive and drug therapy. They are treated with counseling also if there are no other mental problems.
Extreme Cases that require aversion therapy or desensitization:
• Brain Damage
• Injury
• Severe Mental Illness
Treatments:
- How a pathological liar gets treatment depends on that one person’s characteristics and health.
- Most often, counseling is the best treatment. Especially for those who know they lie and admit it later. However, they struggle to stop.
- A pathological liar who also has OCD and ADHD will respond better to a treatment with medication. Also they will be following cognitive behavioral therapy. In severe cases, the healthcare professional will prescribe antipsychotic medications or even aversion therapy.
Considerations
It is sometimes hard to treat pathological liars because the health care professional have to look at all the factors. The healthcare professional will have to accurately diagnose any other underlying conditions as they may be treatable as well. They need to be extra cautious because some medicine can make another existing disorder worse.
A person who is going through the treatment process should be willing because If not, they could lie about how the treatment is working and therefore make it very hard to distinguish if it’s actually helping.
Relation to brain study possibly
There was actually a study on pathological lying in October 2005. The British Journal of Psychiatry said that a pathological liar may have just a little different brain than someone that does not have this lying problem. If this study were to be true, it would make treatment so very hard. The reason they suggest this from the study is because pathological liars have shown 26 % more white matter than others with other kinds of psychological disorders that don’t lie.