How to confuse psychologists

beginning of April: I call the social care and reserve a time for a psychiatrist, or so I believe. I go to the library of the university psychology department to study a bit on how to successfully mislead psychologists. "When doing a psychiatric evaluation, you should pay attention to the patient's behavior and gestures".. "Psychosis", "neurosis", very interesting...I make a list of psychological problems that I could pretend to have, delusions of grandeur might be a believable one. In the night prior to the interview I sleep less than usual to make a more believable impression.

But when the interview day comes, it turns out that they assigned me to a regular doctor instead. She asks me about why I don't want to go to army, and I appeal to drug use, but she wants to see needle marks on my arms or some physical evidence that I use drugs. Since I don't have any, she just does a regular medical examination for me. For example, she tells me to close my eyes and put my fingers together. I hadn't expected this, so I comply. Now, I really regret that I didn't just suddenly pretend to have spasms and to be unable to get my fingers to touch each other...She obviously isn't quite sure what to do with me, so she writes a statement in which she recommends that my army duty be postponed for two years, and then reevaluate the situation. Fuck, I could've got it postponed it anyway, like I've been doing this far by appealing to studies.

On May 11th I decide to try a private psychologist this time. I reserve a time and the psychologist says that he'll send me a psychological evaluation form which I should fill out and mail back to him. On May 15th the evaluation form arrives. These are the same questions that I got asked 5 years ago when I was drafted for the army. There are 400 true/false questions along the lines of "I would like to be a florist", "I am being followed", etc. Some questions are asked more than once for some reason, probably to detect it if somebody tries to pretend to be insane by randomly answering yes/no.

"Faking a personality test is painting a picture rather than solving an equation". I paint a picture of a paranoid, manic and slightly insane man. I really try to be consistent and convincing, and I do pretty good it seems. "Somebody has tried to poison me":Yes. "Occasionally my soul separates from my body":Yes. "If given the opportunity, I could be of great service to the mankind":Yes. I make up some stories to tell if the psychologist asks about my answers to those questions. There are plenty of "normal" questions too, and I answer those as consistently as I can, and mail the results back on the following day.

May 18th: Time for the interview! In the morning I consume some DIPT in an attempt to make myself appears strange, but I guess the dose was too low, it was my first time anyway. But when I go to see the psychologist, it looks like I faked those 400 questions pretty well, because at first the psychologist seems to believe that I am a genuine nutcase. But he asks some random questions that I haven't thought about beforehand, like family / school / etc. so I answer truthfully and soon he says that he isn't sure of what to think of me. I guess I should've paid more attention to pretending to behave strangely, but that would've made it more difficult to prevent myself from laughing.

The session moves on, and next comes..The inkblot test! I hadn't thought of this beforehand, but it's fun. "What do you see here?" "That's the face of a wolf with 4 eyes". "That's a bat flying away". "Which of these best describes yourself?" "The bat flying away" (of course) I try to think of the most disturbed interpretations to the pictures, but on one picture I am even forced to admit that all I can see is two little girls sitting next to each other. I also have slight trouble maintaining my poker-face, and it shows through a bit maybe.

Next the psychologist gives me 8 cards with different colors, and asks me to put in order of which color I prefer most and which least. I pick black, grey and violet as my favorite colors, which seems to be a good choice, because the psychologist soon says something like "I can see that you have some defiant qualities under the surface"

He asks about my family and whether I have an alcohol problem. I tell about my drug use, and give him a list of all the drugs I've tried. He doesn't dwell on it at all. I actually like that psychologist, it's a shame that I can't really talk with him truthfully.

The psychologist show me the results of the 400-question test, and says that the values indicating paranoia, mania and schizoid qualities are pretty high (just as I had planned!)He asks me whether I have been depressed, and I haven't prepared any stories about depression so I can't really tell him anything convincing, but I should really have thought of that too, pretending to be manic-depressive would've been a nice touch.

Next the psychologist just spends a couple of minutes in his chair and looks totally confused. I guess he really suspects that I am just faking, but he says he can write the statement. He says that in my case the diagnosis wouldn't be a single personality disorder, but rather a combination of different disorders. 8)

After I mailed the paper into the army office, it didn't take long for a reply to arrive..Freed from duty!