I feel that I would be hard to tell if people were faking mental illness. Personally for awhile I was misdiagnosed as bipolar and would post down in the bipolar forum, then stopped posting and when my diagnosis changed last year I was afraid to come back to this site for fear that I'd be called out on "faking illness" when really it was just a misdiagnosis. I've been in intensive treatment from January of 2016 through now, just ended 20 months of intensive individual therapy and a DBT program (stage 1 skills group, stage 2 trauma), and am still in a depression and anxiety group. Now that I'm doing better I feel like noone will believe that I have mental illness (only those closest to me know and one friend). My family thought I was taking until I made an attempt on my life twice, now they know it's real. Even though I had depression diagnosed at the age of 12 my family still thought it wasn't real until I was 24. I try to be careful of who I tell so I don't get accused of faking or become a pariah. So I give people benefit of the doubt when it comes to mental illness and whether or not it's faked.