munchausens syndrome

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Often the "by proxy" type is used wrongly as an accusation towards caregivers of disabled children. This is especially common in the UK but happens in the USA as well. It is used as evidence to get children out of their families by accusing the parents of inducing their disability.

It does exist. I have a friend whose son was adopted by a woman who probably killed her first adoptive daughter through making her do things to induce diseases. My friend last I heard was terrified that her son will be next, because the adoptive mother has been having him even when he was only a tiny child diagnosed as psychotic to get him on medications. The symptoms she described only happen when she has access to him, they disappear when she is not around.

But around me it was used towards someone near me once who was not engaging in it. At that time hearing the word I thought it was me who was considered doing that, but it wasn't, it was something even more disgusting, which was insurance companies manipulating another person in my life by getting them diagnosed with that. My real psychiatrist and psychologist almost didn't tell the person because of how stupid and ridiculous it was. I heard it only thirdhand through hearing conversations so I thought people were talking about me, but they weren't. (This page shows a whole lot of stories very similar to what was happening, although I think it goes too far by saying this form of abuse doesn't exist, because it does.)

Some people have taken things I've said about this incident as meaning I have it, but that's really stupid and ends up being all about not knowing the whole story. Every physical condition I have had, has eventually been confirmed by either proper testing or (in the case of things like autism, which was both suspected and confirmed before I was ever even aware what it was) interviews of a variety of people who knew me from infancy.

It is a really popular thing to question whether autistic people are really autistic though. It betrays, at least to me, a high reliance on medicalistic views of our lives. I have a few friends who despite being autistic, avoid the autistic community because of the kind of pointless gossip about who's real and who's not. This sort of discussion can be really destructive to people too... I know someone who quit a mailing list I was on because there was too much discussion of this, and he'd just been denied housing in the real world because he wasn't considered "really autistic enough". When someone is vulnerable because of that much personal devastation, encountering all this stuff about who's real and who's not, and who can prove it, can be even more devastating, making them wary of reaching out to the community. This sort of stuff basically just seems to feed into the exact sorts of thinking that keep autistic people down, and I regret the tiny number of times that I have engaged in it in the past, because it's really easy not to know the whole story, but to think you do -- and to ruin people's lives as a result. I still need to apologize to someone I accused of not being real, when it looked really really obvious they were pretending to be someone they weren't... and then it turned out I hadn't known, that they were adopting an online alias as they'd been instructed to for personal safety. You can't know everything and sometimes it's better not to judge.

Why is this called a syndrome instead of a disorder? Are they born with it?


I am wondering now if that one mother in The Sixth Sense had it because she kept her daughter sick and one day she died and they were all having a funeral in their house and Cole gave the tape to the girl's father because she wanted to tell him something.


When I first saw the movie when I was 15, I didn't understand why a mother would do that to her kid and my mother said she did it for attention so people would think "Oh she is so good, look how she is caring for her daughter" but she was never sure if she killed her daughter or not on accident or on purpose but said she might have done it on purpose so people would feel so sorry about her and the girl gave the tape to Cole to show her dad because the mother might do the same thing to her other daughter next for attention.
I said it sounded sick and my mother said "It is sick."

I've have no reason to assume anyone I know has it. It's possible, but even if I highly suspect them of having it, how would I know? I'm not their doctor. It's different if they are a close family member and you can clearly see the patterns, have talked with the doctors, ect... But I wouldn't want to jump to conclusions about someone just because they seem to have bad luck too often and seem to need sympathy for it. It's the ones that hurt their children that I have a hard time with. Again, never known any personally, but I've never liked or respected people that hurt kids and animals.

As far as faking Autism, that would be a really, really difficult one to fake because it requires a childhood history to back it up. That would be extremely exhausting and isolating too. If all they want is sympathy and attention, wouldn't they pick something more traumatic, easier to fake, and one that doesn't potentially disable their ability to have normality when they choose. Autism is a very inconvienient choice to fake just for attention, unless they only use it as a fascade to strangers.
I also don't think they would become a member of an online community, simply because their sympathy and attention seeking relies on the probibility that other people don't have the rare and horrible condition they do. IMO.

I read that one website about mothers against MS and I was surprised parents have been accused of making their child ill.


Goodness I had a lot of ear infections when I was a baby and fevers and I sure hope my parents didn't get accused of making me have those conditions. They did keep taking me back to the doctor and then I lost my hearing eventually and then I stopped babbling completely and then I was speech delayed. I also got sick and had to have my adnoids (sp) taken out, then my tounsels (sp) a year later.

Some luck I had. My mother even blamed herself for my ear infections because she thought she did something wrong when I was in her tummy and it caused all those infections. I was sick a lot when I was a baby.


I just hope when I have a child I won't get accused of making my child sick because I have to keep taking it to the doctor because he or she keeps having health problems. I'd be real upset and offended.

There are parents that take their child to the doctor for every single thing, but to say they have MS is a bit far-fetched?

As for the Sixth Sense movie, I always thought her stepmother was trying to kill her, not keep her sick.

i am not spokane girl

I wouldn't be surprised if parents of ASD kids (who are frequently on the spectrum themselves) get accused of Munchhausen's by proxy more often than non ASD parents. I have never been accused of it, but I spent a couple of years being afraid of it because one of the traits/signs/symptoms of Munchhausens' by proxy (or it's what I read back then in the 1980's or 90's) was that the parent had lots of medical vocabulary. Well, I knew all the pertinent hospital type vocabulary because I needed it and I'm very good at remembering vocabulary. Nurses would ask me if I was a nurse (I would never want to be a nurse) because I knew terms that most moms don't use. To me it's about being precise... anyway... no one ever hinted that they thought my kid was being harmed by me. My kid never had infections which I guess is one easy way to get a kid sick, and my kid never had broken bones or burns or overdoses or any of those suspicious looking things.

I was always comforted a bit by the fact that I had a history of NOT going to the doctor myself and of not taking my kids to the doctor for every little cold or scratch (though I did take them in for check ups and the ASD kid was having surgeries which is why we were in the hospital and I was needing to know these medical terms).

I know a mom who has a 20 year old ASD daughter, the mom was accused of causing her daughter's health problems a couple of years ago. This young woman has some unusual health problems (her heart stopped a few times as a baby, but it wasn't because the mom was smothering her or anything of the sort, it was because she has a specific heart problem) Well, the mom didn't have a way to cause the problems the young woman had in her teens (like a brush with anorexia, and serious anemia from being on an antipsychotic that the mom never suggested she be on), but the mom was still accused of this possibly by a really mean relative who was actually more likely to have tried to keep the girl sickly and who thought the antipsychotic prescription was a really good idea.

as an aside...
I know the Munchhausen's by proxy label shouldn't be thrown around lightly, but if you read what some of the "mercury moms" and "biomed" moms do to their kids, you really got to start wondering if they enjoy watching their kids get endless numbers of blood draws and endless quantities of IV's of questionable fluids and their being put into toy mHBOT balloons and so forth. DAN! dox are wonderful for paying attention to their clients, it's what quacks do. Straight doctors are not so fawning, but quacks play mommy and best friend to their patients which is one reason why they are so attractive.

Speaking of faking disabilities, there was a guy who faked having mental retardation and he pretended to have a mind of a three year old just so he could get away with grabbing his caregivers breasts. His mother went along with it and hired caregivers for her son but he was eventually arrested. I wonder how someone found out he was faking it. Maybe he was caught talking to his mother and the police were called and sexual assault was reported.

I wonder if it's even illegal to fake conditons. I know it's illegal to cheat the gov. system.

There was a mother in Tacoma, Washington who had her sons pretend they were mentally ret*d so she get social security. She started coaching her sons when they were 4 to act that way and at age 26 one of them was caught on camera at the bank talking about his check so that's how SSI knew it was all fraud and the mother got in trouble and so did the kids. I think that article was posted on here in the news section awhile back. I thought it was sick and worst of all, putting her kids through it when they were little and they grew up to be frauds because they went along with it. Still not fair for the child. It's taking away their life in the future because they are being taught to be criminals.