It's like when I was in my high 20s, low 30s, I could still pass for a teenager. But everything changes once you reach once you're around 40, it's all downhill from there. That's true.

I always looked younger too until 40. And then no one just took me for much younger anymore. Nope.

Nope. Nope. I need to know why poses a

teenager just so people would take her in because she needed the financial help. Obviously, if she was an adult, people wouldn't be so willing to help her. Yeah, this is a great question. So let's explore that. I mean, now that we know the story, the more interesting part here is why did she do this? Why did this happen? And again, this is what the reason Stella suggested this case. So I think there's a few possibilities. First of all, the one would be as the prosecutor said, it's a straightforward one. Trava was simply a fraud who decided it was easier to live off the state and other people financially by posing as a teenager. And so this was a better option than trying to find her way as an adult with no resources. That's one possibility. Another possibility. Trava couldn't handle growing up sort of like the Peter Pan and Wendy syndrome. You've heard of this. This is technically not a recognized diagnosis, but has been observed in certain people that they cannot handle growing up. And they must sort of

continue to live in a childlike state. I know you said she was evaluated for competency to represent herself. Were there other mental health evaluations? Like I'm wondering, is it possible that she suffers from dissociative disorder?

Well, that is the other option. So if it's not that she's a fraud and it's not that she has the Wendy slash Peter Pan syndrome, is it possible that she was suffering from dissociative identity disorder, DID, otherwise referred to as multiple personality disorder? And this is where different personalities formed to protect a person from the trauma they experienced in their original personality. This is a rare diagnosis. And in fact, it's

one that some people dispute even exists. Now, this is a

possibility, but oftentimes there are more personalities that develop to protect their host. But they also usually know their host personality. They can discuss that. In this case, there was a lot of people who are not going to be able to do that. There was no ability for Brianna to recognize that she was Trieva. It also seemed that Brianna had developed different aliases, but they weren't quite distinct personalities. So that part isn't very fitting with dissociative identity disorder. She's claiming to know nothing about who Trieva was, which would not quite fit. And she settled on one identity in the end with no references to other personalities at all and no evidence of their personality. So that's not the correct diagnosis. Are there other mental health

diagnoses that would possibly be relevant here? Okay, so there's another one that's closely related to DID that's called dissociative

fugue. And this is a temporary state of amnesia in which a person can't remember who they are or where they came from. You said temporary. It is temporary. And that's the problem here. So if this is in fact the case, then why could Trieva never seem to recall where she came from? What does temporary actually mean? Maybe it's a 10 year

temporary? Who knows? But that doesn't seem to fit that well either. Another option is that Trieva suffered from factitious disorder, whereby,

remember, she was telling a lot of stories about harm in order to gain attention and sympathy and other benefits from people. It's possible that she made up these stories about being a victim that didn't really happen to fit with factitious disorder or also for the purpose to gain attention, but to protect herself from really affecting her. And this is a very confusing one for me. What do you think? I don't know. This is a tough one. At first, I thought DID, but your explanation makes me think otherwise. Factitious disorder, maybe a little more so. Part of me thinks she's intentionally

sticking with the story because she wants to live with her. But your explanation makes me think otherwise. Factitious disorder, maybe a little more so. Part of me thinks she's intentionally sticking with the story because she wants to leave that horrible life behind as anyone would. And if what happened to her is in fact true, I can understand why she would just want to start all over. So part of me thinks that she knows very well that she's Trieva, but she's just sticking with that story because she does not want to go back to that life. But I do believe she does suffer some form of mental illness. I mean, look what the girl has been through. I can't imagine that she's medicated or seeking mental health treatment. And then part of me thinks, if she wants to be this other person, she's an adult. She's not harming anyone. She's not stealing anyone's identity by doing so. Of course, there was per dream. No, she did. In the past. She perjured and she signed false documents. She perjured on these documents. But now moving forward, if she wants to just be Brianna and she's not harming anyone, I say let her be.

Well, yeah, at this point, I think the point was that she had defrauded a lot of people at the time, including social service agencies by taking money that should have gone to actual children. So I don't think that she had DID. I don't think that she had factitious disorder. I believe that she was very traumatized and that she really needed to escape this life. I believe that she created identities to become someone else because she had to be someone else in her mind. This relates to questions of the system, though. Okay. We often asked did the criminal justice system get it right. But what about the other system? What about the foster care system and social service agencies? There's a couple points here. First of all, Trieva always looked a lot older and had a lot of false claims, but they didn't seem to follow her. And even when people suspected she was older, she seemed to be able to convince them. They would let it go. So is this a mistake or because they wanted to believe her? That's one of the questions here. But the other question relates to whether or not the foster care system gets it right because that 18 Trieva is left on her own. And not many 18 year olds are, I would say now, especially, but I wouldn't say are really prepared to be completely on their own without any type of support. It's a scary notion at 18 to be completely on your own. For me, I know that I was extremely independent. I went to college, but I was never completely on my own.