By Linda Marsa
Marc Feldman has spent more than 25 years studying fakes, but the bespectacled Alabama-based psychiatrist still vividly recalls the woman who introduced him to what became his life’s work. It was in the early 1990s, when he was a newly minted psychiatrist, shortly after completing his residency at Duke University. His department chair asked him to see a patient he calls “Anna,” who was suffering from an unusual psychological disorder.
The woman sitting in the brightly lit exam room was emaciated, and her gaunt body was virtually devoid of flesh with an ill-fitting brown wig sitting on her shaved head. She was in her 30s and had been employed in a position of some responsibility. Anna’s alarming appearance was presumably the result of several grueling rounds of chemotherapy for her metastatic breast cancer, which had sucked about 60 pounds off her frail frame and caused her hair to fall out.
Except that it was all a lie. For nearly two years, Anna had pretended to be sick: She copied the cancer symptoms of an acquaintance, starved herself to shed weight, and shaved her head to mimic the appearance of undergoing treatment. In a case report, Feldman and his co-author Rodrigo Escalona noted that Anna…
