Fake doctor’s histrionic personality disorder

"Fire Cart" is a movie made from the same-titled novel written by Japanese writer Miyuki Miyabe. In the movie, main character Jang Mun-ho searches for his fiancée Seon-yeong, who suddenly disappeared. What Mun-ho found was the cold reality where her name, career and even social ID number were all fake, taken from another person. Since her early childhood, the disappeared fiancée had been harassed by cruel moneylenders from whom her father borrowed money. Driven into a corner, she killed "real" Seon-yeong and started a fake life. After being afraid that Mun-ho would find that her life is actually someone else’s, she jumped into a railroad track and ended her fake life with a tragic death.

Something that might happen in such a movie occurred in real life. In 2011, a 34-year-old woman surnamed Park got married to her husband by deceiving him that she was from a wealthy family and a gynecologist working at Seoul National University Hospital. Right after their marriage, Park gave a foreign car to her husband as a gift, and went around in the hospital wearing a white doctor’s gown with a name tag. The happily married couple had a baby daughter. The life of this family that appeared perfect broke into pieces one day when Park disappeared with her baby.

While searching for the disappeared wife, the husband found everything in her life was fake. Visitors to the wedding ceremony and even her parents at the wedding were all paid actors. Her education background and career, a graduate of Seoul National University and a doctor working at the university hospital, were all falsehood. More shockingly, the husband’s sister gave 500 million won (approx. 450,000 U.S. dollars) to Park for bond investment without his knowledge. Park borrowed money from eight people including a housekeeper and a security guard in the apartment. When the fraud and falsehood that she had been juggling with reached to the limit, Park disappeared like a heroine of the movie "Fire Cart."

The Seoul Central District Court sentenced Park to five years in prison for fraud based on habitual lies. Park who now is living with her daughter in the prison has submitted a letter of apology six times as a plea for mercy to the court but could not avoid severe punishment. It is naturally hard to believe the sincerity of Park’s apologies since she had lived a life full of lies and got involved in a con even while she was brought to the court. A pathological phenomenon in which a person lies to seek attention from others and ends up with being confused between the truth and the falsehood, just like Park, is called histrionic personality disorder. There is an adage that says, “If you want to con others, you must deceive yourself.” Park seems to fit into the case of histrionic personality disorder as she lived a life just like the old saying.