Have you ever come across munchausens by proxy?

[Namechangeone]

As per my username I’ve name changed. It’s quite an identifying situation so I’m not going to go into too much detail but don’t want to drip feed either

Edited for clarity: Has anyone experienced munchausen by proxy themselves or known someone that has? I could be wrong about this but it's what myself and others suspect.

Im middle child of 5. Us older 3 lived with grandparents, youngest 2 with parents.

I unfortunately have had quite bad luck when it comes to health. Various ICU stays, operations, long term conditions. No empathy from my parents and now grandparents unfortunately have died.

My younger brother who grew up with my parents has perfect health, had many scans after our mum claiming my brother can't barely walk/has back pain/stomach pain all sorts. Had every test going from teens until now (he is late 20s). Even went as far as paying for private tests because they didn't believe nhs consultants.
They've bought him a wheelchair/crutches for when things are bad - this typically happens when I've just had a hospital stay or there's an event coming up.
In privacy he walks around at home normal. He lives next door in a house they built for him but stays at parents house.

Recently they took him to A&E saying he needed emergency surgery as he's suddenly paralysed - scans were clear. This was day 1 after myself being diagnosed with lymphoma.

He has had every scan going that you can think of and multiple opinions. Also my brother and parents have been offered psychiatric support many times (and declined)

At home he doesn't need to even take paracetamol but if there is an event, he's in agony and needs pain relief and looking after. Apparently can't take tablets so it's calpol 🤦‍♀️
They have a prayer WhatsApp group for him & regular social media posts.

Im not envious of the lack of empathy I have - I'm quite happy in my own bubble & I wouldn't want to live this fake life. I had a good childhood with my grandparents, although miss my gran especially a lot with everything going on in my personal life.
I do have therapy/counselling etc & continue to throughout the years.

Everything had gone back to "normal" with them all but my brother is getting married in a couple of weeks and the wheelchair etc is back out. This happened after the A&E visit one day after my lymphoma diagnosis.
I can't get my head around it all.

I just basically wondered has anyone else had this experience or similar with a family member?

95% of the time it doesn't bother me, I have my own life, but then I do get times where it bothers me (like tonight for some reason!)

With respect to posters saying it’s extremely rare, I don’t think that’s the case. There’s isn’t that much known about it but the experts in MH and MBP seem to think it’s actually more common than is recognised. I think people who take it to the point of harming others is probably very rare, especially in parents and carers. But I think there is a fairly low level of MH and MBP that is not rare. I’ve certainly seen it several times in my fairly limited social circle.

You are speculating though. It's equally likely (if not far more likely) that those people have conditions that haven't been diagnosed yet.

Pretty much everyone with my (very much real, but hard to spot/diagnose) neurological condition has a story to tell of years or decades of struggle and judgement from drs/acquaintances/family before finally someone realised what they had and everything finally made sense..

There must be countless people out there who I have lost touch with who judged me for being constantly ill etc /taking so much time off each time I got a cold /not having anything actually wrong etc etc. and that will be the same for hundreds of thousands of others with my condition or similar ones

My illness means even a tiny cold makes me quite ill, each period makes me ill, any stressful event makes me ill, over exertion makes me ill. It also manifests in several different ways including gastrointestinal issues as well as neurological ones (vision issues, severe weakness). It would be so easy for people to have judged this as MBP.

There is a difference between faked or induced symptoms and psychosomatic symptoms. There is not enough understanding that depression and anxiety often causes physical symptoms that are real.

100% and I totally get this. I’m not an expert so I can have got it all completely wrong and I’m happy to admit this.

Brother has admitted he’s always felt “well” and he was just following what was his norm & liked the attention in secondary school. (We went to separate ones).

I’m not sure what’s brought this episode on but he was out last night drinking then on the church fb group this AM in a wheelchair.

Mother/Brother offered and declined any psych help saying God will help them.

I think moving forward I’m going to concentrate on the health and happiness of my DC & I. I can’t help everyone.
I’m a lone parent and I need to conserve my energy for them.
Im going to continue my (endless!) therapy and not revisit childhood :)

NoisySnail · Yesterday 20:04
Lupus was considered a mental illness because it often causes depression, anxiety and emotional imbalance.
It was over 70 years ago asthma was considered psychosomatic. Medical knowledge has advanced enormously since then.

Quite right.

Depression is also a symptom of Hypothyroidism. Not many know that carpal tunnel syndrome goes with hypothyroidism too. How many sufferers of depression have their thyroid gland tested?

I have hypothroidism. It has many more symptoms than depression or anxiety. It is about a lack of a hormone that affects lots of functions in your body. If your only symptom is depression, then you probably have depression.

SpaghettiWithaYeti · Yesterday 23:04

I do feel for you. There are many scientific papers being published now. Do you have a problem with local anaesthesia? I do, It has the opposite effect. Instead of deadening the area, it actually makes it more live. It has taken me years to convince people of that. Surgeons insisted it is not possible, to their cost on occasions. A few years ago I read a paper online by scientists who proved that those with a neurological condition, like polyneuropathy do have this problem.

It isn't just the symptoms people don't believe. I cannot feel my feet - at least when something or someone touches them. I can feel them with my hands, and get intense pain down inside the bones, but I cannot feel an injury and have no idea how my feet get injured, consequently it is very difficult when someone asked you how it happened.

One early morning I got up to go to the bathroom and saw my foot was covered in blood. It wasn't there when I went to bed. The injury was traced to a cut between two toes. When asked how it happened, I said I didn't know. The looks I get when this happens are priceless. It wasn't until I was knitting in bed about a fortnight later, that the ball of wall rolled off the bed and the yarn went between two toes. I looked at all my sheets, and there was a long thread loose and the penny dropped. I have had a needle and thread removed from my foot, after discovering that a spot had no healed. I thought I could feel something. GP did not. The podiatrist said he thought there was something there and excavated with his scalpel. He pulled out a long thread, and said he thought it was a hair, because hairdressers sometimes get hair fallen in their shoes creeping under the skin. The he said there was something else, and another dig and out came a needle - a tiny quilting needle. It had not only gone into the skin, but had been threaded with cotton and dragged the thread behind it. We just fell about laughing. I now have to investigate everything, in case.

Why are you angry? Who are you angry with? What are your plans for the future?

NoisySnail · Today 00:32

I do too. My GP then was convinced I had it, but he kept sending blood to the blood lab and it kept coming back NAD. As I had insurance, he sent me to London where it showed I needed 120mcg and the Hospital for Nervous Diseases said my carpal tunnel in bother hands was so severe if I did not have the op right away I would lose the use of them.

You get all your prescriptions free if you have thyroid disease, and I wondered then if the laboratories have the expense of that in mind. I have 15 items on my repeat.

I was getting depressed, because I had been told a few years before this that I would not get any better, but I didn't expect to get worse either.

@llizzie - yes anaesthesia is very dangerous for my condition (Myasthenia) - to the point that as soon as I was diagnosed I got a medicalert bracelet stating "anaesthetic risk".

It's lucky I had never needed a general anaesthetic in the time before I was diagnosed. It's part of the reason I am so cross GPs lacked the curiosity to keep investigating. my condition also meant I was very high risk during the pandemic and should have been shielding.

The dismissal of symptoms as psychosomatic/not problematic etc is not just deeply unfair it is also dangerous/puts lives at risk

@llizzie - yes anaesthesia is very dangerous for my condition (Myasthenia) - to the point that as soon as I was diagnosed I got a medicalert bracelet stating "anaesthetic risk".

It's lucky I had never needed a general anaesthetic in the time before I was diagnosed. It's part of the reason I am so cross GPs lacked the curiosity to keep investigating. my condition also meant I was very high risk during the pandemic and should have been shielding.

The dismissal of symptoms as psychosomatic/not problematic etc is not just deeply unfair it is also dangerous/puts lives at risk

This is why FII has been invented - it’s not a diagnosis like MSBP. FII is more a collection of red flags / alerting signs and circumstances and that means that anyone can be labelled and it’s viewed by many as a pre cursor to or the same as MSBP. It’s pulling in a lot of innocent families and they are suffering

SpaghettiWithaYeti · Today 08:08

I do agree with you. I have had some very serious surgery, but cannot take either local or general anesthetics now. The last two times I ended up in cardiac care for tooth roots and an endoscopy!! I am absolutely afraid of hospitals now. I have made my carers promise never to call for anything, because so few of them know the extent of neurological diseases. They understand 'MS' because it is talked about. I sometimes say ''one of the MS types'' but it doesn't match much. Modern medical technology is a wonderful thing, and helping science to diagnose and treat - or tell you there is no treatment - but where it falls short in the NHS is that if doesn't actually let the medics know, and what they don't know, they don't treat, so it is pushed into the file marked 'is this patient having a laugh?' sort of thing with DNR across the cover!

My friends daughter had a swollen optic nerve. The optician found it. Went to the drs who referred her and the neurologist flat out refused to scan her. Said it was nothing. Probably all in her head and ignore it

it was only because the nurse heard it and begged the dr.

sadly she had a terminal brain tumour and died 2 years later and I often think…..what I’d that nurse wouldn’t of pushed it. How far would it have been before they found the terminal diagnosis. When she went deaf? Blind? Paralysis? When her eyes drooped?

I mean at what point do you go that is enough and those symptoms can’t be caused by somatic diagnosis?

if a brain tumour is missed. Anything can be missed or told that it’s all in your head.

There is also huge Misinformation on this post regarding it.

You need two hormones tk sustain life. Thyroid and cortisol

so any problem with thyroid needs immediate medication.

drs should know this. Sadly I’m the uk we have such a high range and they’re trying to get this changed. The USA have a much smaller range and subsequently have a much higher percentage of people with hypothyroidism or hyperthyroidism

You also get All your prescriptions free if you have adrenal insufficiency which is also a hormone disorder.

No because it's happened since her brother was a child. Sounds more like the parents are doing it and he goes along with it because he's known nothing different.

"He will never leave and it breaks me that such a good man is living the life he does. "

I'm really sorry to say this, but I don't really understand how your father can be such a 'good man' when he has allowed his wife to abuse their son in this way and even colluded with it. I don't see how even coercive control, and certainly not religion, can be a justification. Good parents protect their children.

I can see how he can't come out and say what's going on though because then everyone will know he was also lying all these years.

"MBP is really incredibly rare."

How would you even know how many people have it?

<a class="break-all" href="https://www.google.com/url?q=www.cypnow.co.uk/analysis/article/cases-of-fabricated-illness-rise&sa=U&ved=2ahUKEwiO-8uws7OFAxUxREEAHf9ZDLo4ChAWegQIFhAB&usg=AOvVaw0uzogtm3GbMMOZnN88fSDU" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">CYP

"FII is often mistaken for Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (MSbP), an extremely rare psychiatric diagnosis. Dr Alison Steele, officer for safeguarding at the RCPCH, says that deliberate attempts to induce illness in a child, by poisoning them or withholding treatment, for example, are “very rare”."

Case in the news in Scotland today - woman sentenced to 7 years.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-68537940

@Misthios thats absolutely awful 😔 I haven’t even read the article fully yet 😢

I saw the article and came to post too, the headline and the photo of Menhinick with a NGT made me massively suspect Munchasens and later confirmed she had diagnosis

People always struggle to believe that a mother would do this to her children. Or that adults would deliberately make themselves ill. But both do happen. And no it is not always undiagnosed illnesses.
I read about another woman who would create scabs by picking at her legs and then smear her own faeces inside. She ended up causing so many infections over time that she had her legs partly amputated.