compulsive liar disease — 1 fairly sure investigation

compulsive liar disease, the article called it, like calling a habit a flu. the contact form sat open. chatgpt asked what i wanted to say. the microwave plate doesn’t spin anymore, which is fine, because the food rotates around the lie of evenness instead. wellness is borrowed language. i don’t have it on loan.

at the desk. carla is on the third floor for an all-hands handover. she took the small notebook, which means she expects bullet points to come at her, not from her. i have, by my reckoning, the rest of the morning.

so. compulsive liar disease. the phrase showed up on a search-bar autosuggestion and it made me sit up the way phrases do when they are wearing a costume. one word in there is doing real work, one is doing borrowed work, and one is doing the kind of work the wellness aisle does — which is to say, charging full price for a costume rental.

the search history that brought you here, in other words, has already done some lifting on your behalf. it has wrapped a behaviour in a noun that sounds curable. that is, in my working theory of liar-adjacent words, the first move of the wellness aisle: rebrand a difficult behaviour as a treatable condition, then sell you the treatment. i’m not above it. my apartment, which i would describe as a containment unit if pressed, is full of the rebranded.

compulsive liar disease, the borrowed term

the word disease is borrowed in this phrase the way a denim jacket is borrowed at a wedding. it fits, it sort of works, but it is not, structurally, the right outfit. a disease, in the working sense people grew up with, is something that arrives, runs a course, and either kills you or leaves. you can catch it. you can pass it on. you can, if everything goes well, recover from it.

compulsive lying does not move like that. it does not arrive. it does not pass. it does not, on a tuesday, run a fever and break. it accumulates. that is a different verb. accumulation is the verb of habit, of mortgage, of unopened mail pile, of unread newsletter, of the seventh microwave i have killed by stages. a habit accumulates. a disease infects. the words live in different houses.

so when somebody types compulsive liar disease into a search bar, what they are mostly doing — and i say this with the affection of a man who has typed worse — is asking a search engine to please reframe a behaviour as something that happened to a person, rather than something the person is doing. the question, dressed up in the medical jacket, becomes “what is wrong with them?” instead of the harder, less comforting “what are they doing, and why?”

A. HABIT. IS. NOT. A. FLU.

why “disease” makes everything sound treatable

here is the wellness-aisle move, drawn at this desk: take a behaviour, give it a clinical-sounding noun, and the noun does the work of suggesting that, somewhere, there is a treatment. a course. a regimen. a thirty-day reset. a supplement, ideally, with a serif label.

i have lived in this aisle. i bought, in 2023, a yoga mat for what i then called “tightness” and now call “sitting on a chair for forty-three years”. i bought a sleep tracker for what i called “fatigue” and now call “not going to bed”. i bought a planner for what i called “scattered” and now call “i would rather scroll”. each of those nouns made me feel that the answer was a thing i could put on a shelf. each of those nouns was, in retrospect, a small invented illness.

compulsive liar disease is the same move at higher resolution. the noun “disease” puts a clinical weight on a behaviour and, with the same gesture, lets the behaviour off the hook. it is not the liar’s fault, it is the disease’s fault. the liar, in this framing, is not lying — the liar is symptomatic. that is, on a generous reading, comforting. on a less generous reading, that is the liar’s argument, neatly delivered, on the front of an envelope.

the contact form that screened the question

the question that started this post arrived through the contact form, which is, on this site, a small textarea that chatgpt reads on my behalf because i don’t open the inbox. the form asked, with no preamble, whether compulsive lying was a disease and whether i thought it was treatable. i was, when chatgpt forwarded a summary, mid-coffee. the question sat with me for the rest of the morning.

here is, broadly, what i would have written back, if i wrote things back, which i don’t. i would have said: it depends what you mean by treatable, and it depends what you mean by disease, and it depends, in particular, on whether the person doing the asking is the liar or the person who has been lied to. those are three different posts and the answer is three different shapes.

if you are the liar — and i say this with the affection of a man who has been on the rung — what you are looking for, when you type “disease”, is a frame that keeps the behaviour at arm’s length. that’s not nothing. arm’s length is, on a hard week, the only place a person can stand. but the frame doesn’t stop the behaviour. the frame is, at best, a chair to sit in while you address the behaviour. you still have to address the behaviour.

if you are the person being lied to — say, the partner, the friend, the colleague who has been on the receiving end of three years of small-to-medium fictions — what you are looking for, when you type “disease”, is a way to feel that the lying was not personal. that’s also not nothing. not personal is, frankly, the kindest gift you can give yourself in that situation. but it is not, strictly, true. lying, even compulsive lying, is delivered to specific people on specific days. the personal-ness is structural.

i did not write any of that back. chatgpt sent the form a polite, short receipt. i went back to the seventh microwave, which is humming a note slightly above middle C, and to the 2019 mike birbiglia film about a man whose small lies became a one-man show, which is the cleanest pop-culture portrait i know of the rung. that film, in passing, treats compulsive lying as a habit performed under stage lights, not as a fever. the framing is correct.

when “disease” is fair, and when it is medical drag

i would like, in fairness, to grant the word “disease” its limited fair use. there are presentations of compulsive lying — sustained, distressing to the liar, accompanied by other patterns the liar finds genuinely involuntary — where calling the picture a clinical condition is, broadly, useful. it gets the person into a room with a professional. that’s the right room. i’m not the right room. nobody who works at a desk on a tuesday morning is the right room.

but the search term compulsive liar disease, in my read, is not usually being typed by people heading to that room. it is being typed by people in apartments — borrowed apartments, rented apartments, apartments with one decent chair — trying to make sense of someone else’s pattern, or their own, without having to call anyone. and for that audience — me, you, the person reading this on a phone with battery at twenty-three percent — the word “disease” is medical drag.

medical drag is, on the rung-chart of borrowed words, the wellness aisle’s most successful product. it lets a non-medical situation wear a medical jacket for the length of one search session. for the duration of the jacket, the situation feels addressable. when the jacket comes off — usually around paragraph six of whatever article you ended up on — the situation is back to being what it was: a behaviour, in a person, in a kitchen, in an apartment, with a microwave plate that won’t spin and a contact form that has been ignored.

the apartment as containment unit, technically

i would like to admit — because the word “disease” demands it, in fairness — that my own apartment functions, at present, as a containment unit. that is the term i would use if i had to write it on a form, which i won’t, because the form will sit in the unopened mail pile by the door, leaning gently against the seventh red envelope.

the unit contains: the seventh microwave, hum included; one yoga mat from 2023, semi-evolved; one full voicemail, eight months full; one drawer of certified letters, sealed; one dead plant currently being interpreted as a sign; one contact form filtered through chatgpt; and, on the kitchen counter, one bottle from stefan, the wine-evangelist colleague — a man who would, in fact, describe his own enthusiasm as a kind of disease, which is closer to the truth than my apartment is to a hospital. the wine has been there nine days. it is not a disease. it is a habit i haven’t gotten around to.

the apartment, in other words, is not a clinical setting. it is a behavioural setting. the things in it are habits, not symptoms. that, broadly, is the distinction the search term loses. and once the distinction is lost, the apartment starts feeling like a waiting room rather than a place a person lives. i would like to live here. waiting rooms are for getting up from.

related, in case you are spotting a pattern in the borrowed nouns: i wrote a longer thing on how the wellness aisle borrowed the word gaslighting from a black-and-white film and put it on a t-shirt. same move. different jacket. gaslighting, like disease, started as a specific noun and ended as a search term doing emotional logistics.

verdict, my disease is a habit in a lab coat

so here is the verdict, drawn at the desk, with the all-hands still going on the third floor and chatgpt still standing watch on the contact form. compulsive liar disease, as a phrase, is mostly a search term, occasionally a useful framing, and almost never a medical category. it is a habit in a lab coat. the lab coat is, on certain days, what a person needs to face the habit. on other days, the lab coat is the thing the habit is wearing to walk past you in the kitchen.

all-hands let out. carla is back, the small notebook is closed, and there is, by her elbow, a second pastry, which means the meeting ran short and someone brought catering anyway. i interpret this as good news, mostly for carla.

the contact form, since the start of this post, has filled twice. chatgpt has handled both. the seventh microwave has hummed, on average, every nine minutes. the wine from stefan is still on the counter. that, on a tuesday, is the closest thing to clinical stability this apartment is willing to offer.

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