Disability fraud is the receipt of payment(s) intended for the disabled from a government agency or private insurance company by one who should not be receiving them, or the receipt of a higher amount than one who is entitled to them should be receiving. There are various acts that may constitute disability fraud. These include feigning a medical problem in order to be declared disabled, exaggeration of an existing medical problem that potentially can but in reality does not render the person disabled, continuing to receive payments after having recovered from a medical problem, or continuing to receive payments while working (usually unreported) above the allowable level for those receiving the payments.

Disability fraud can be harder to detect than other forms of fraud, as the majority of people receiving disability payments (at least 90%) do not use a wheelchair or walker, while at the same time, many people who need wheelchairs would not qualify for disability payments. Since most disabilities are "silent" (meaning that they cannot be seen by others), it is not easy to visually determine if a person receiving disability is not disabled. Such people are often able to perform physical activities, but have some other underlying cause of their disability. It is therefore common for people to believe they must report a neighbor who they see, for example, climbing on the roof while collecting disability payments, but this is not always the case.

Meanwhile, true disability fraud cases exist, for which it is hard to determine the cause as being fraudulent. Often, the perpetrator claims to have a medical condition to be declared disabled. Some medical conditions are truly debilitating and make it impossible or difficult to work if one has them, but are hard to prove against one's own word that one does not have them. These include chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic pain, or various mental disorders. Even if one with one of them is viewed engaging in some other "work-like" activity not for pay, they may have difficulty holding a job.

It is possible that the illegal recipient of the disability payments is not truly disabled, and may have a case of work aversion, which in many countries is not alone considered a valid reason for being declared disabled, or the person may otherwise lack a work ethic. Others who are receiving payments are actually working, but are not reporting their employment and collecting their income in a manner that cannot easily be detected.

Disability fraud can result in denial of future benefits as well as criminal prosecution.

Different therapies are offered to children with motor skills disorders to help them improve their motor effectiveness. Many children work with an occupational and physical therapist, as well as educational professionals. This helpful combination is beneficial to the child. Cognitive therapy, sensory integration therapy, and kinesthetic training are often favorable treatment for the child.

Malingering is the fabricating of symptoms of mental or physical disorders for a variety of reasons such as financial compensation (often tied to fraud); avoiding school, work or military service; obtaining drugs; or as a mitigating factor for sentencing in criminal cases. It is not a medical diagnosis. Malingering is typically conceptualized as being distinct from other forms of excessive illness behaviour such as somatization disorder and factitious disorder, e.g., in DSM-5, although not all mental health professionals agree with this formulation.

Failure to detect actual cases of malingering imposes an economic burden on health care systems; workers compensation programs; and disability programs, e.g., Social Security Disability Insurance (United States) and U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs disability benefits. False attribution of malingering often harms genuine patients or claimants.

There is no treatment for intellectual disability but there are plenty of services offered for those diagnosed to help them function in their everyday lives. Professionals will sometimes work out an Individualized Family Service Plan (IFSP), which documents the child's needs, as well as the services that would best help them specifically. Speech, physical, and occupational therapy may be offered. Intellectually disabled children can be placed in special education classes through the public school system, where the school and parents will map out an Individualized Education Program (IEP). This program lays out all of the services and classes the child will become involved in during their time in school.

For much of the second phase of his career, Cyclist Lance Armstrong faced constant allegations of doping. Armstrong consistently denied allegations of doping until a partial confession during a broadcast interview with Oprah Winfrey in January 2013.

Cheating at the Paralympic Games has caused scandals that have significantly changed the way in which the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) manages the events.

Testing for performance-enhancing drugs has become increasingly strict and more widespread throughout the Games, with powerlifting seeing the most positive results. Competitors without disabilities have also competed in some Paralympic Games, with the Spanish entry in the intellectually disabled basketball tournament at the 2000 Summer Paralympics being the most controversial.

A disability pretender is subculture term meaning a person who behaves as if he or she were disabled. It may be classified as a type of factitious disorder or as a medical fetishism.

One theory is that pretenders may be the "missing link" between devotees and wannabes, demonstrating an assumed continuum between those merely attracted to people with disabilities and those who actively wish to become disabled. Many wannabes use pretending as a way to appease the intense emotional pain related to having body integrity identity disorder.

Pretending takes a variety of forms. Some chatroom users on internet sites catering to devotees have complained that chat counterparts they assumed were female were revealed as male devotees. This form of pretending (where a devotee derives pleasure by pretending to be a disabled woman) may indicate a very broad predisposition to pretending among devotees.

Pretending includes dressing and acting in ways typical of disabled people, including making use of aids (Walking sticks, crutches, wheelchairs, mobility scooters, white canes, etc. Pretending may also take the form of a devotee persuading his or her sexual partner to play the role of a disabled person. Pretending may be practiced in private, in intimacy, or in public, and may occupy surprisingly long periods. In the latter case, some pretenders hope that the disability may become permanent, such as through tissue necrosis caused by constricted blood supply.

The United States Social Security Administration accepts reports from the public for the following types of fraud:

- Applicants who state they are not married when they are. Those receiving Supplemental Security Income (SSI) can have their benefits reduced by their spouse's income and assets, so some applicants may wish to hide the existence, income, or assets of their spouse.

- Claims of blindness. In particular, the Social Security Administration is concerned about those who declare they are blind and unable to drive, but are later found to be in possession of a driver's license and are observed (legally) operating a motor vehicle.

- Unreported income. Some types of income that often go unreported are from renting out a portion of one's home, or from an insurance policy.

- Employment changes, in a person who was not working at the time they applied for and started to receive benefits, but has since returned to work.

- A person who is living in an institution, such as a long-term care facility or a prison.

- A person who is the legal custodian (representative payee) of a disabled person's money spending it on some expense other than that of the disabled person.

- A person who cashes the checks of a deceased person.

In most instances, stating categorically that an individual is malingering requires an explicit admission by that individual. Legally the term may be considered prejudicial and excluded on that basis. No current research exists regarding the frequency, behaviour or detection of successful malingerers. No neuropsychological inventories exist that can be used to conclusively determine if a patient is malingering, or to exclude a determination of malingering. Genuine neurological and psychiatric conditions may return false positives. Testing inventories cannot distinguish between exaggeration and fabrication. Psychological inventories rely on naivety. Criminally, an assessment may lead to punishment enhancement, and medically, to denial of future treatment. The DSM-V criteria faces scrutiny for providing poor guidelines. As such physicians ultimately rely on their intuition and gut feeling for any assessment, which is subject to prejudice and cognitive dissonance, and which has been shown to be unreliable in synthetic tests.

Malingering presumes an exhaustive diagnostic procedure has been performed. Exhaustive diagnostics are neither practical nor economically viable or judged to be in the best interests of the patient's health. Radiological and invasive exploratory procedures can be necessary for an accurate diagnosis yet pose a health risk to the patient. Radiographic diagnostics expose the patient to radiation and surgical diagnostic procedures can carry a high risk of complications and mortality, such as a lumbar puncture, the only reliable diagnostic procedure for diagnosing rare terminal forms of parasitization, which the CDC reports as only being diagnosed "post mortem" 75% of the time. A physician invariably faces limitations in the realms of resources, time and liability. Because an assessment, formal or informal, of malingering ceases the medical process, it may seem an attractive option for the physician and help them to cope with cognitive dissonance over their failure to effectively diagnose and treat a patient within constraints.

Patients with unresolved illness may be adversarial towards physicians, attempting to game the triage system in order to receive specialist care. Such cases fit the criteria for malingering, yet the patient is still in need of medical care.

For example, in a gatekeeper system, primary care physicians may restrict the availability of HIV testing to only patients who report high risk activity. A patient may then falsely report sexual and/or drug history and/or symptoms in order to elevate priority which can then go on to serve as diagnostically relevant history for an inaccurate path of further diagnosis.

Medical practitioners often believe that they can detect deception. In two studies, experienced medical practitioners including psychiatrists failed to perform better than chance when asked to detect lying and simulated patients. In 12 other studies, detection rates of simulated patients ranged between 0 and 25%. It's impossible to detect malingering from a clinical perspective.

A fasting girl was one of a number of young Victorian girls, usually pre-adolescent, who claimed to be able to survive over indefinitely long periods of time without consuming any food or other nourishment. In addition to refusing food, fasting girls claimed to have special religious or magical powers.

The ability to survive without nourishment was attributed to some saints during the Middle Ages, including Catherine of Siena and Lidwina of Schiedam, and regarded as a miracle and a sign of sanctity. Numerous cases of fasting girls were reported in the late 19th century. Believers regarded such cases as miraculous.

In some cases, the fasting girls also exhibited the appearance of stigmata. Doctors, however, such as William A. Hammond ascribed the phenomenon to fraud and hysteria on the part of the girl. Historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg believes the phenomenon to be an early example of anorexia nervosa.

The term imbecile was once used by psychiatrists to denote a category of people with moderate to moderate intellectual disability, as well as a type of criminal. The word arises from the Latin word "imbecillus", meaning weak, or weak-minded. It included people with an IQ of 26–50, between "idiot" (IQ of 0–25) and "moron" (IQ of 51–70). In the obsolete medical classification (ICD-9, 1977), these people were said to have "moderate mental retardation" or "moderate mental subnormality" with IQ of 35–49.

The meaning was further refined into mental and moral imbecility. The concepts of "moral insanity", "moral idiocy"," and "moral imbecility", led to the emerging field of eugenic criminology, which held that crime can be reduced by preventing "feeble-minded" people from reproducing.

"Imbecile" as a concrete classification was popularized by psychologist Henry H. Goddard and was used in 1927 by United States Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in his ruling in the forced-sterilization case "Buck v. Bell", 274 U.S. 200 (1927).

The concept is closely associated with psychology, psychiatry, criminology, and eugenics. However, the term "imbecile" quickly passed into vernacular usage as a derogatory term, and fell out of professional use in the 20th century in favor of "mental retardation".

In recent decades, the phrases "mental retardation", "mentally retarded", and "retarded" initially used in a medical manner, are regarded as derogatory and politically incorrect much like "moron", "imbecile", "cretin", "dolt" and "idiot", formerly used as scientific terms in the early 20th century. On October 5, 2010, President of the United States Barack Obama signed Senate Bill 2781, known as "Rosa's Law", which changed references in many Federal statutes that referred to "mental retardation" to refer instead to "intellectual disability".

Attraction to disability or devotism is a sexualised interest in the appearance, sensation and experience of disability. It may extend from normal human sexuality into a type of sexual fetishism. Sexologically, the pathological end of the attraction tends to be classified as a paraphilia. (Note, however, that the very concept "paraphilia" continues to elude satisfactory definition and remains a subject of ongoing debate in both professional and lay communities) Other researchers have approached it as a form of identity disorder. The most common interests are towards amputations, prosthesis, and crutches.

By most definitions, intellectual disability is more accurately considered a "disability" rather than a "disease". Intellectual disability can be distinguished in many ways from mental illness, such as schizophrenia or depression. Currently, there is no "cure" for an established disability, though with appropriate support and teaching, most individuals can learn to do many things.

There are thousands of agencies around the world that provide assistance for people with developmental disabilities. They include state-run, for-profit, and non-profit, privately run agencies. Within one agency there could be departments that include fully staffed residential homes, day rehabilitation programs that approximate schools, workshops wherein people with disabilities can obtain jobs, programs that assist people with developmental disabilities in obtaining jobs in the community, programs that provide support for people with developmental disabilities who have their own apartments, programs that assist them with raising their children, and many more. There are also many agencies and programs for parents of children with developmental disabilities.

Beyond that, there are specific programs that people with developmental disabilities can take part in wherein they learn basic life skills. These "goals" may take a much longer amount of time for them to accomplish, but the ultimate goal is independence. This may be anything from independence in tooth brushing to an independent residence. People with developmental disabilities learn throughout their lives and can obtain many new skills even late in life with the help of their families, caregivers, clinicians and the people who coordinate the efforts of all of these people.

There are four broad areas of intervention that allow for active participation from caregivers, community members, clinicians, and of course, the individual(s) with an intellectual disability. These include psychosocial treatments, behavioral treatments, cognitive-behavioral treatments, and family-oriented strategies. Psychosocial treatments are intended primarily for children before and during the preschool years as this is the optimum time for intervention. This early intervention should include encouragement of exploration, mentoring in basic skills, celebration of developmental advances, guided rehearsal and extension of newly acquired skills, protection from harmful displays of disapproval, teasing, or punishment, and exposure to a rich and responsive language environment. A great example of a successful intervention is the Carolina Abecedarian Project that was conducted with over 100 children from low SES families beginning in infancy through pre-school years. Results indicated that by age 2, the children provided the intervention had higher test scores than control group children, and they remained approximately 5 points higher 10 years after the end of the program. By young adulthood, children from the intervention group had better educational attainment, employment opportunities, and fewer behavioral problems than their control-group counterparts.

Core components of behavioral treatments include language and social skills acquisition. Typically, one-to-one training is offered in which a therapist uses a shaping procedure in combination with positive reinforcements to help the child pronounce syllables until words are completed. Sometimes involving pictures and visual aids, therapists aim at improving speech capacity so that short sentences about important daily tasks (e.g. bathroom use, eating, etc.) can be effectively communicated by the child. In a similar fashion, older children benefit from this type of training as they learn to sharpen their social skills such as sharing, taking turns, following instruction, and smiling. At the same time, a movement known as social inclusion attempts to increase valuable interactions between children with an intellectual disability and their non-disabled peers. Cognitive-behavioral treatments, a combination of the previous two treatment types, involves a strategical-metastrategical learning technique that teaches children math, language, and other basic skills pertaining to memory and learning. The first goal of the training is to teach the child to be a strategical thinker through making cognitive connections and plans. Then, the therapist teaches the child to be metastrategical by teaching them to discriminate among different tasks and determine which plan or strategy suits each task. Finally, family-oriented strategies delve into empowering the family with the skill set they need to support and encourage their child or children with an intellectual disability. In general, this includes teaching assertiveness skills or behavior management techniques as well as how to ask for help from neighbors, extended family, or day-care staff. As the child ages, parents are then taught how to approach topics such as housing/residential care, employment, and relationships. The ultimate goal for every intervention or technique is to give the child autonomy and a sense of independence using the acquired skills he/she has.

Although there is no specific medication for intellectual disability, many people with developmental disabilities have further medical complications and may be prescribed several medications. For example, autistic children with developmental delay may be prescribed antipsychotics or mood stabilizers to help with their behavior. Use of psychotropic medications such as benzodiazepines in people with intellectual disability requires monitoring and vigilance as side effects occur commonly and are often misdiagnosed as behavioral and psychiatric problems.

Until the 1990s, it tended to be described mostly as acrotomophilia, at the expense of other disabilities, or of the wish by some to pretend or acquire disability. Bruno (1997) systematised the attraction as factitious disability disorder. A decade on, others argue that erotic target location error is at play, classifying the attraction as an identity disorder. In the standard psychiatric reference "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders", text revision (DSM-IV-tr), the fetish falls under the general category of "Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders" and the more specific category of paraphilia, or sexual fetishes; this classification is preserved in DSM-5.

Autistic enterocolitis is the name of a nonexistent medical condition proposed by discredited British gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield when he suggested a link between a number of common clinical symptoms and signs which he contended were distinctive to autism. The existence of such an enterocolitis has been dismissed by experts as having "not been established". Wakefield's now-retracted and fraudulent report used inadequate controls and suppressed negative findings, and multiple attempts to replicate his results have been unsuccessful.

Reviews in the medical literature have found no link between the MMR vaccine and autism or with bowel disease.

Most of Wakefield's coauthors later retracted the conclusions of the original paper proposing the hypothesis, and the General Medical Council found Wakefield guilty of manipulating patient data and misreporting results. His work has been exposed as falsified and described as an "elaborate fraud".

Special education classes are the primary treatment. These classes focus on activities that sustain growth in language skills. The foundation of this treatment is repetition of oral, reading and writing activities. Usually the SLP, psychologist and the teacher work together with the children in small groups in the class room.

Another treatment is looking at a child's needs through the Individual Education Plan (IEP). In this program teachers and parents work together to monitor the progress of the child's comprehensive, verbal, written, social, and motor skills in school and in the home. Then the child goes through different assessments to determine his/her level. The level that the child is placed in will determine the class size, number of teachers, and the need for therapy.

Drug diversion is a medical and legal concept involving the transfer of any legally prescribed controlled substance from the individual for whom it was prescribed to another person for any illicit use. The definition varies slightly among different jurisdictions, but the transfer of a controlled substance alone usually does not constitute a diversion, since certain controlled substances that are prescribed to a child are intended to be administered by an adult, as directed by a medical professional. The term comes from the "diverting" of the drugs from their original licit medical purpose. In some jurisdictions, drug diversion programs are available to first time offenders of diversion drug laws, which "divert" offenders from the criminal justice system to a program of education and rehabilitation.

Individual therapy may be best suited to treat the individual's delusions. Persistence is needed in establishing a therapeutic empathy without validating the patient’s delusional system or overtly confronting the system. Cognitive techniques that include reality testing and reframing can be used. Antipsychotics and other therapeutic drugs have been used with relative success.

Many medications are used to treat ASD symptoms that interfere with integrating a child into home or school when behavioral treatment fails. More than half of US children diagnosed with ASD are prescribed psychoactive drugs or anticonvulsants, with the most common drug classes being antidepressants, stimulants, and antipsychotics. Antipsychotics, such as risperidone and aripiprazole, have been found to be useful for treating irritability, repetitive behavior, and sleeplessness that often occurs with autism, however their side effects must be weighed against their potential benefits, and people with autism may respond atypically. There is scant reliable research about the effectiveness or safety of drug treatments for adolescents and adults with ASD. No known medication relieves autism's core symptoms of social and communication impairments. Experiments in mice have reversed or reduced some symptoms related to autism by replacing or modulating gene function, suggesting the possibility of targeting therapies to specific rare mutations known to cause autism.

The main goals when treating children with autism are to lessen associated deficits and family distress, and to increase quality of life and functional independence. In general, higher IQs are correlated with greater responsiveness to treatment and improved treatment outcomes. No single treatment is best and treatment is typically tailored to the child's needs. Families and the educational system are the main resources for treatment. Studies of interventions have methodological problems that prevent definitive conclusions about efficacy, however the development of evidence-based interventions has advanced in recent years. Although many psychosocial interventions have some positive evidence, suggesting that some form of treatment is preferable to no treatment, the methodological quality of systematic reviews of these studies has generally been poor, their clinical results are mostly tentative, and there is little evidence for the relative effectiveness of treatment options. Intensive, sustained special education programs and behavior therapy early in life can help children acquire self-care, social, and job skills, and often improve functioning and decrease symptom severity and maladaptive behaviors; claims that intervention by around age three years is crucial are not substantiated. Available approaches include applied behavior analysis (ABA), developmental models, structured teaching, speech and language therapy, social skills therapy, and occupational therapy. Among these approaches, interventions either treat autistic features comprehensively, or focalize treatment on a specific area of deficit. There is some evidence that early intensive behavioral intervention (EIBI), an early intervention model based on ABA for 20 to 40 hours a week for multiple years, is an effective treatment for some children with ASD. Two theoretical frameworks outlined for early childhood intervention include applied behavioral analysis (ABA) and developmental social pragmatic models (DSP). One interventional strategy utilizes a parent training model, which teaches parents how to implement various ABA and DSP techniques, allowing for parents to disseminate interventions themselves. Various DSP programs have been developed to explicitly deliver intervention systems through at-home parent implementation. Despite the recent development of parent training models, these interventions have demonstrated effectiveness in numerous studies, being evaluated as a probable efficacious mode of treatment.

Controlled prescription drug classes which are commonly diverted include:

- Benzodiazepines – including diazepam, temazepam, clonazepam, and alprazolam – prescription anxiolytics and sedatives

- Opioids – including morphine, hydrocodone, oxycodone and codeine – prescription pain medications

- Stimulants – amphetamine, methylphenidate, and modafinil – prescribed to treat ADHD and narcolepsy

- Z-drugs – including zolpidem (Ambien), Eszopiclone (Lunesta) – prescription sleep medications

According to the United States Department of Justice, "Most pharmaceuticals abused in the United States are diverted by doctor shopping, forged prescriptions, theft and, increasingly, via the Internet." To reduce the occurrence of pharmaceutical diversion by doctor shopping and prescription fraud, almost all states have established prescription monitoring programs (PMPs) that facilitate the collection, analysis, and reporting of information regarding pharmaceutical drug prescriptions.

LBLD can be an enduring problem. Some people might experience overlapping learning disabilities that make improvement problematic. Others with single disabilities often show more improvement. Most subjects can achieve literacy via coping mechanisms and education.

There is no consistently effective medication for SMD, and there is little evidence for any effective treatment. In non-autistic or "typically developing children", habit reversal training may be useful. No treatment is an option when movements are not interfering with daily life.

Remediation includes both appropriate remedial instruction and classroom accommodations.

Emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD; sometimes called emotional disturbance or serious emotional disturbance) refer to a disability classification used in educational settings that allows educational institutions to provide special education and related services to students that have poor social or academic adjustment that cannot be better explained by biological abnormalities or a developmental disability.

The classification is often given to students that need individualized behavior supports to receive a free and appropriate public education, but would not be eligible for an individualized education program under another disability category of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).