Well... realistically I think it would take a psychologist or psychiatrist to figure out what's going on with your friend. I don't know anything about this myself. But I wonder if perhaps this might be classified as a type of "factitious disorder", one type of factitious disorder being Munchausen's Syndrome? (Just an uneducated guess.) I wasn't able to find much of anything in PC's archives on either of these conditions. But you can search them on Google or Bing.