Independent Perspective News

A life with cheating brings fear and distrust, according to mental health specialists. Lie can cause breathing and heart diseases, and even accelerate a terminal patient's death.

Can one live telling only the truth? Can one tell everybody, in any circumstance, what one thinks? The most basic rules of social behavior seem to say no. It seems truth as an absolute is more a moral aspiration than a possible practice.

Lies, on the other hand, are a habitual part of human conduct. As a matter of fact, most adults lie at least a little in their everyday lives. But has that fictional plus people add to the narrative of their existence to make it more beautiful or to conceal its least attractive features any consequences on health? "A life woven with a weft of lies equals an unhealthy life, one with psychic and somatic consequences, because it implies keeping up welfare ideals at the expense of deep fear great distrust in one's own ability to face things", says Perla Pilewski, a member of the Argentinean Psychoanalytical Association.

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From breathing problems to heart diseases, including the acceleration of the process of death in terminal patients, are some of the results that systematic cheating can draw. That's what professionals specialized in palliative care, step families and couple therapy believe. They all agree that truth can be more painful than a lie, but it's better for body and mind. And that a life knowing what things are like is a high-quality one. Why? When having all the information, a person can choose the way they prefer and the body is spared the trouble to give way to the lies and uncertainties by getting sick. When that information is insufficient, there can appear asthma, heart diseases, stress and even "death acceleration", according to psycho-oncologist Juliana Taquini.

Then why do people lie?

"People keep family secrets, disguise or deny a fact because there is an enormous psychic pain, an extreme shame, fear of going crazy and even fear of dying", describes psychologist Irene Meler, coordinator of the forum of Psychoanalysis and Gender of the Association of Psychologists of Buenos Aires.

"Lying and hiding are different things", distinguishes Pilewski, from the APA. "Lying is inventing a different reality; hiding, on the other hand, is turning a subject into a taboo, not talking about it at all".

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"Accepting the truth always implies killing an illusion and elaborating mourning (...)".

Being the owner of one's own body

Medicine's traditional paternalist approach has long denied the patient of information on their health. In the unequal relationship doctor-patient, lack of explanation and even deception were customary for a long time. This attitude, considered today as lying, was supported by the mistaken notion that it guarded the patient from greater harm. But with the birth of the Doctrine of the Informed Consent -a person's autonomous and voluntary decision to be treated- the truth regarding health became a fundamental ethical rule.

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"Information -that is to say, truth- is an indispensable requirement to make a free choice", considers Maglio, a counselor at the Muñiz Hospital, the INCUCAI and the Huésped Foundation, "because besides involving the right to rule regarding one's own body, it implies the right to choose how to live and how to die".