mental illness lying for attention — 1 fairly sure investigation

the gym sauna-only routine ends and i text dave back about money. carla texts at the same moment about the weekend. mental illness lying for attention, the article said, is its own category. i am not in it. tom, comparison-wise, was. the unopened mail pile is the only attention i seek. cereal is soup with rules.

writing this from the desk at 9:18, two screens open, neither of them the article. carla just left for an annual planning meeting on the third floor and i have, generously, an hour before the next interruption. dave’s text says “any update”, which is dave for “the three hundred”, and i typed back something that solves nothing.

the kitchen has the unopened mail pile leaning a little more to the left this week. it is not a problem yet. it is a sculpture i have not signed.

mental illness lying for attention, the careful version

the phrase mental illness lying for attention shows up in two places. one, careful clinicians using narrow language about narrow patterns. two, the rest of the internet, which uses it the way i use the word “expert”, which is loosely and to win arguments. i’m fairly sure there is a study somewhere, possibly in a serious magazine, that says the careful version is rare and the loose version is everywhere.

i decline to be the loose version. i also decline to diagnose tom from across a parking lot in 2009. that man is not a category. that man is a guy with a volvo and a tendency to overstate his cardio.

here is the rule i keep at this desk: a person can be a liar in the small mundane way without anything in the loose version applying. lying as a symptom of mental illness is a real, narrow thing. lying as a hobby on a slow afternoon is a different thing. the internet collapses both into one phrase and then sells you a checklist.

the checklist is always thirteen items. it is always thirteen.

why i decline to medicalize a tuesday

compulsive lying for attention is a phrase that sounds heavier than it is when you say it out loud at the bar. mike, who has not filed a single return since 2019, looked up from his glass last week and said “that just sounds like monday”. mike is not a clinician. mike is, however, often correct about the temperature of a thing.

medicine for compulsive lying is not a tablet. there is no chewable. i looked it up because i had to write this and i do not, in general, take advice from sites that end in health. the careful answer is therapy, the loose answer is a five-minute video. i picked neither.

the principle, which i did not invent and which i will defend until the planning meeting ends, is that you should not call something an illness when “wednesday” will cover it. noted: i am aware this is also how people avoid going to the doctor.

A TUESDAY IS NOT A DIAGNOSIS.

dave laughed, carla minimized her tab

dave called yesterday. dave laughed for nine straight minutes, the count i keep running puts the lifetime total somewhere north of an hour. then he asked, in dave’s roundabout way, whether i’d seen the article about lying and mental health, because dave reads things now, apparently, between insurance calls.

i had not. he summarized. his summary was the loose version, with extra confidence. i did not correct him because correcting dave costs three hundred dollars and i already owe him that.

carla, separately, sent a screenshot at 11:23 from her desk one floor up. the screenshot was a checklist. she added “asking for a friend”, which is carla for “this is about my brother”. i replied with the boring careful answer and she minimized her tab. that is how the third floor handles things.

tom would say “attention,” i would say “logistics”

tom and i grew up in the same town. tom now owns a house, two children, and a volvo with seats that adjust in fourteen different ways. tom, in college, embellished. tom would say he ran a 5k he did not run. tom would say he met a band he did not meet. tom called this storytelling. a serious person might call it something else.

tom did not have, by any clinical measure i’m fairly sure exists, the careful version of the term. tom had the loose version, which is also called being twenty-two. tom grew out of it. tom now bores his children with true things, which is its own punishment.

my version of attention-seeking is not seeking attention. it is the inverse. i do not pick up the phone. i do not open the bank app. i do not respond to certified letters. tom would say “attention”. i would say “logistics”. we are both, in our way, valid. mine has more naps.

the table is not science. the table is what an investigation looks like when the investigator is a person with a desk and a kettle.

the certified letter drawer, attended to never

there is a drawer in the kitchen. it contains certified letters. it does not contain anything else, because i committed to its purpose two years ago and have, since, attended to it never. the drawer holds, by my last quick count without opening it, six envelopes. one of them is pink, which is a color i associate with regret.

this is, in the loose version of the term, attention-avoidance behavior. in the careful version it is filed as “please go to a real person”. in my version it is logged as monday’s problem, which is also how i felt about monday, which has now passed five times since the first letter arrived.

the unopened mail pile in the kitchen is the visible cousin of the drawer. the drawer is the iceberg. the pile is the tip. neither is a symptom. both are a system. noted: a system is what a person calls a problem when they want to keep it.

verdict, the attention i avoid is also attention

here is the verdict, in the small confident font that the planning-meeting people use. mental illness lying for attention is a careful phrase about a small group of people who deserve careful clinicians, not a long thread about your coworker. lying and mental health overlap, narrowly. they do not overlap when a man at a barbecue says he met the bassist of frasier in 2003. that man is just a man at a barbecue.

i am, by my own loose count, a person who avoids attention so aggressively that the avoidance becomes a kind of attention. dave noticed. carla noticed enough to send a checklist. mom, who phones on sundays, knows. mothers know. it is their power. it cannot be defeated.

so the verdict, and you can copy this onto a sticky note: keep the careful phrase careful. keep wednesday a wednesday. keep the certified-letter drawer closed. cereal is soup with rules, and the rules, in this case, are that we don’t medicalize what we can shrug off, and we don’t shrug off what we can’t.

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