The manipulative patient: an interactional approach

The words manipulative or manipulation are used in the contemporary psychiatric literature to describe certain persons and their habitual modes of behavior. The terms represent an attempt to describe some essential quality of the patient's style of relating to others. In the following discussion, we will attempt to shift this perspective to a more interpersonal one, seeing the attribution of this label as part of a sequence of communication, mutual perception, and struggle between caretaker and patient. The accusation that a patient is manipulative signals the disruption of the helping process.