People Who Lie About Illness & Dying

[MightyMagician]

Believe it or not, this is a thing. It's absolutely amazing how far people on the internet would actually go to get attention. Many people fake illness, but not many will have the balls to actually say they're dying when they aren't, and it's important to notice the signs when somebody is doing just that. A few weeks ago I was in a Discord server, and one of the users, who everybody knew as Alice, who is very well respected there, managed to pull this off - even convinced everyone that she spent her last minutes there, just before dying. When I got around to looking at key details she told everyone, I realized quickly that what she had told everyone was literally impossible, yet nobody else did because her personality is probably the most likeable one out of that entire server. Without leaking any of the original messages or the server, I will relay the story, and use bullet points to address the parts that make it unbelievable. All of this has become public information there - information she gave.

Alice devoted her time on this server to making everybody happy, to a fault. Last December, everything changed when her father died, putting her family through financial hell. Sometime midway through that month, after being absent for a time, her server friends received text messages from saying that she cut herself, and that she was dying from brain damage sustained from blood loss while she was unconscious. Without further ado, I'll start dissecting this.

-Alice claims that she was unconscious for too long, and that she lost too much blood. Sure, that is possible, but unlikely unless you've slit your wrists or cut the carotid artery, which would cause you to lose enough blood that you die within minutes. If you've cut yourself in any other place and have lost enough blood that you've been unconscious for a long time, you're just as likely to die unless you're with paramedics.
-According to her though, her mom stopped her as she cut herself, and she recalled "all she saw was madness". So which is it, was she unconscious, or not? People on the server try to claim that this was a separate incident earlier that month. The problem is that she never mentioned this at any point, and continued the conversation as if this was the one that led to everything.
-Alice has mentioned that her condition was chronic, and that "pills help slow the process". When a close friend of her's messaged her in January and asked if her condition was treatable, she contradicted this by saying "Sure thing, but to get away from it will take a time." to which she goes on to explain that she was using a drug to treat herself, but specifically asked that nobody know about it. A few days later, she mentioned that for whatever reason, she didn't want her doctor knowing what she was using. Ignoring the fact that she just blatantly admitted to lying about her condition having no treatment options and that she was doing so, she was talking about being cured altogether, but that it would be some time before she was fine.
-Also, shouldn't her doctors have known about this? How was she sneaking drugs into a hospital without anybody noticing?
-In February, she remarks how that in 10-15 years, she'd need a wheelchair. Wouldn't that mean nothing since she claimed she was dying?
-The following Wednesday that week, she threatens suicide because, again "The pain is overwhelming, I'm dying". After berating one of the server owners for trying to be supportive, she calms down, and remains happy.
-Come Friday, she claims that she suffered a seizure, and that her disease rapidly progressed, and that she was officially going to die. She mentions phantom pain, with a partial understanding of the concept. "I feel the pain all over me, but my brain doesn't register where it's coming from.". Phantom pain is only present if you have a limb amputated and you still feel pain from its location. There is no way, she had phantom pain, not by her own description of her symptoms.
-The day before she supposedly died on the server, she posted a full color drawing that she made. It was never seen before that day, so she had to have made it that day. Problem is that she had already mentioned to a moderator there that she switched her pfp to the white Discord background because she had trouble seeing colors. Given how she claimed she was losing the strength to be awake, it just reeks of her being at home on a pc, not in a hospital on a mobile phone.
-Finally, on the day she supposedly died, she said "10 mins to euthanasia". Since she's from Russia, that's a flat out lie - it's illegal there. Not only do doctors have to keep a record of how they treat their patients, a licensed doctor would not kill a patient at their request when their medical condition was caused by a suicide attempt.
-Via messages with a friend of hers, she said that words on the internet do not have the capacity to harm people, and that any perceived harm "is all in your head". Meaning she believed she could say anything without consequence, even if it was a serious lie.
-The Friday before she died, she said that she came to the server to quench her thirst for attention. Stellar choice of words for somebody who's dying.

After trying to contact her Skype, somebody claiming to be the sister responded. When I got around to asking how she got on the account and why she was using it instead of her own, all communication stopped. Everyone on the Discord server concurs that the account was only used by her, and she never mentioned giving it away. If it was the sister chatting with me, I would've gotten an answer to that, but it appears it's Alice.

Bottom line: Don't lie about illnesses or dying. People will catch you eventually, and the end result won't be pretty.

[LUCPIX]

Bottom line: Don't lie about illnesses or dying. People will catch you eventually, and the end result won't be pretty.

Goddamn it. To fraud death is worse kind of pretense because once executed, the only way to keep others convinced that you are really dead is... spending the rest of your life away from them, as though you're either all ashes or underground!

Why do people do that, in your opinion? What's the kind of thing they're actually intending once they cogitate this idea?

[Neversoft]

What's the point in lying about dying? Surely there are better ways to get attention. Why not lie that you're rich or secretly famous or something? If you lie about dying, then you're going to have to die at some point, and then what? They can't get any attention if they're 'dead.' I hope this Alice comes back and starts claiming to be reborn after meeting God.

[MightyMagician]

Goddamn it. To fraud death is worse kind of pretense because once executed, the only way to keep others convinced that you are really dead is... spending the rest of your life away from them, as though you're either all ashes or underground!

Why do people do that, in your opinion? What's the kind of thing they're actually intending once they cogitate this idea?

People do it for different reasons. Some just really do want the attention, others want to make a profit out of it, but many people do it because they feel like they've already lost everything and want to envision themselves in a world where they are dead, so they try to see if anybody actually does care about them. I think it's the latter with this girl: Very big gamer, and her dad was her family's major source of income. Once he died, everything started falling apart for her, so I can understand why, to an extent. Nobody on the server has actually realized it, though.

- - - Updated - - -

What's the point in lying about dying? Surely there are better ways to get attention. Why not lie that you're rich or secretly famous or something? If you lie about dying, then you're going to have to die at some point, and then what? They can't get any attention if they're 'dead.' I hope this Alice comes back and starts claiming to be reborn after meeting God.

Everything was falling apart for her. She had no friends in Russia, not much of a family that lived nearby her, and mom & possibly her sister were on the brink of poverty when her dad died, so she was working late night shifts to support them. If anything, it was out of pure desperation - that Discord server was literally the only place she had friends. She's the type of person that everybody would believe, just because of how well she's regarded there.

[YellowBelli]

It makes me wonder what’s really going on in Alice's life.. I kind of feel sorry for Alice and her tragic lie.

[MightyMagician]

As I said, back in December, Alice's life was collapsing. Her dad being dead meant she no longer could get games to play(she had a Steam account that that she eventually sold), she had no friends in Moscow, no boyfriend(The one person who loved her, she turned down, and never got the chance again), and a huge burden was on her to help support her family, which not much of one was nearby her.

People are starting to wonder if this was all a prank or not, now that nearly a month has passed, but with her supposed sister not answering on Skype anymore, me and a some friends of mine think she left - that she wanted to get away from the server, and everybody there.

[lawrawrrr]

Yeah I've heard some really, really awful stories about people pretending to be ill. You just cannot keep it up forever, you're gonna be caught out!!

It's also really horrible from the other side. I'm pretty certain that I know of a couple people who lied about mental health issues and you can't just laugh at someone in case they do really have problems, so you spent ages worrying and comforting and talking... and it turns out to be fake?

Definitely a good way to get attention but horrible horrible immoral thing to do.

[FlyingJesus]

Known plenty of people over the years who've faked illnesses of one sort or another - for attention, for money, to get away with being horrible to people, all sorts of reasons. Only once heard of someone irl pretending to have died and he was a real creep who did it to see if girls would cry. Turns out they did and then when he got found out their friends all beat him senseless

[RuthOnToast]

Make stuff up like that is never going to end well people will pick up on it easily. What if people started asking to see in hospital? or went to ask your other family members how you're doing? These so many ways it can go wrong.

The problem with having people like this is that it makes it harder for people who are generally ill because people will just think you're making it up. If something really out the blue or unusual or if you are generally seriously ill you can get people thinking you're making up (or maybe think am the type to beg for attention?) but I've had lots of people saying i fake having autism. When my dad passed away i had a lovely group of people calming i were making the whole thing up calling me some very nasty names.

[MightyMagician]

Genetic disorders are very different than something you acquire during your life. There was one person who was considering actually following up with this by visiting Alice, but as his plans changed, he never went, and thus never found out which hospital she was in.

In Alice's case though, she never gave the name to what she had, and the things she said were inconsistent as time progressed, which I pointed out. One thing I forgot to bring up in the OP was how seizures were one of the symptoms she described. She claimed she had already been taking medication for that, along with her painkillers. The Thursday she claimed she had the seizure that caused it to rapidly progress, she wasn't under suicidal stress like she claimed - she was actually happily chatting that day with her friends and playing League. That left only a few hours in between that time and when things went downhill according to her.

Her family - nobody knows how to find them online. Nor did anyone from her family actually inform the server that what she said was true. Not that it matters - people in a hospital with that much brain damage lose significant functions that they'd normally have, and there she was taking the time to type out multiple coherent lines during a time when she claimed she was losing the strength to even stay conscious.

What's most insulting to me and the people who are just as doubtful as I am is that she made a point out of "Don't make the same mistake I did" while she was clearly lying, while one of the mods of that server ended up attempting suicide for real, and we got verifiable information from the people who knew him. He nearly died because of this, not even 24 hours after everything with Alice went down. There are many legitimate ways to get attention in the right way, this was not one of them.