New writing: Illness Fakers.

plus some liner notes as it were

rare live footage of somebody getting a diagnosis and venturing onto a patient forum for the first time

For The Drift I wrote about my favorite bad subreddit, r/illnessfakers, which basically stalks online people it suspects of pretending to be ill for profit or attention. Buuut it’s also about how it’s sort of difficult to know if you’re telling the truth about yourself in medical contexts, about the trickiness of narrative and testimony in patient forums or medical documents or illness memoir, and the way most people have to deal with a deep-rooted hatred of sick people, who are annoying, when they get seriously sick and realize they’re now one of the annoying people:

Sitting and talking to a doctor, a patient might make a point of maintaining a calm affect, downplaying or dismissing symptoms, just to get the feeling of being on the same team as the doctor: Yeah, I don’t trust her either — that whiner. This behavior is the instinctual and rational response to somebody who has a lot of…