This is my sister We’re having behavioral issues with her and I have reached a point where I just cannot understand what is going on. What I’m trying to ask is Is there any disorders we should be looking at specifically; Why might she be doing this; Any other advice????

She is currently in therapy at a center that does partial care. She does group therapy and DBT and has individual meetings with doctors. I know that it’s a good program because I was in the program for depression and it helped me so much. My sister and I are very different though.

She joined this program for suicidal thoughts but now they’re keeping her for a little longer because they can’t figure out what’s going on. She keeps making up issues for attention.

She copies everything around her. She started self harming after watching an anime about someone who self harms. She began to have tics after hanging out with a cousin who has them. We can tell these things are fake because she doesn’t actually do them unless she’s talking about it. I can give more examples of these situations, but it would make this post longer than necessary. All the doctors know she’s faking, but because of the things she’s claiming they can’t just ignore her.

Her newest thing is claiming she hallucinates. Highly doubtful she does because she can’t keep the stories straight between doctors. However, they have to send her for tests. So now she has to get blood work done and go to a neurologist.

We don’t want to dismiss her problems if they’re real, but everyone knows it’s for attention. She loves attention and she has her whole life. Now it’s not that we don’t give her enough attention. We all try our best but it doesn’t change her behavior. We’ve tried so many things. We’ve tried ignoring bad behaviors and only praising good ones, we take away electronics, we punish. We have completely taken away electronics unless it’s watching TV with the family because she’s proved over and over she can’t be trusted with it.

She also doesn’t display empathy unless she chooses to. It’s like she can turn it on and off. She has plagiarized poems off the internet to pretend she wrote them to impress us, but when we call her out she has no guilt or remorse.

We’ve tried scare tactics like: If you’re lying then we’re wasting all this money and someone else who really needs the help could be getting it.

What else can you do for a kid like this? The therapists are having such a hard time helping because they keep having to go on wild goose chases of all her other “symptoms”.