Short ans...I've known folks like this. One in particular was giving accounts of how some local boys were stalking and promising to assault her. When I first heard the story, either the local boys were criminal geniuses, or she was psychotic. I checked out the local boys and they were dumber than rocks and wouldn't know what to do with a girl if she present herself to them.
Her story was elaborate, bizzare and the more attn she got the more surreal it got. I was of course the bad guy, because I didn't believe it and wouldn't volunteer to protect her. No one believed what I said, so I unlugged the phone. The next AM when everyone showed up she told her story about how they called and tried to get in. After she was done I pointed to the cord laying on the floor. They hated my guts for doing it-said I was just mean. Took them ~hour for it to sink in and almost a month for them to insist she see the docs. It got worse and she did.
There's others I've known, but the stories were more blatently bizzare. That means the ones after them are more easily recognized as figments of imagination. When the story first came out I thought the cops were acting the way they did, because she might have been drugged and didn't remember anything. As it turns out, they just wanted to confirm their suspicions regarding what they perceived.
By bizarre, I mean schizophrenia like delusional reality. Sometimes it's temporary, but more often it becomes permanent. When a normal person is confronted with hard irrefutable facts, they shut up. In this case the woman continued with more bizarre tales. That's the sure sign she is sick.