To know anyone irl with munchausens?

[Lw87]

Watching the gypsy rose doc, I'd never heard of munchausens disease before and can't even think I'd know anyone with it in real life

Has anyone actually had an RL encounter with someone with this?

There is a difference between fabricated illness and illness anxiety disorder though. Some people truly believe there is something wrong with them when there isn't- that isn't the same as Munchausen's. Munchausens is when you fabricate symptoms and at times actually harm yourself to deceive medical professionals and even interfere with tests.
Believing you are ill when you aren't is a different disorder.

There's a few different mental health conditions (with decent overlaps) that are being discussed here.

Fictitious disorder - in self or imposed on another. In this condition, the person knows they/the other person is not truly unwell. However they still seek medical input, for reasons that can be unclear. Its very rare. More common in women as described above or in unmarried men 30-50. There seems to be something in it about seeking caring. If 'by proxy', this is almost always someone they are in a caring role for.

The phrase "malingering" isn't a diagnosis, but refers to the above where there is an obvious benefit for doing so. For example someone suing another person after a car crash pretends to have worse injuries than they do to increase compensation.

Persistent physical symptoms/medically unexplained symptoms/somatic symptoms disorder/non epileptic seizures - all of these refer to physical symptoms which have a psychological cause. The separation from factitious disorders is that these individuals do not create or lie about symptoms consciously. They do have these symptoms, but do not realise they are originating from a psychological place. Often people with PPS have an existing physical health condition and the psychosomatic symptoms are additional to it, related to stress and distress.

Health anxiety - about yourself or someone else. Someone affected may notice physical symptoms more than others because they are so focused on worries about being unwell. They may mistake anxiety symptoms for being unwell. They feel momentarily better once checked out by a medic but then typically build anxiety about it again.

I really want to stress that 1) all the above conditions are a source or expression of great distress and 2) the other possibility is that the person has a physical health condition that is not diagnosed. Medics are not perfect and do miss things. People are thought to be anxious/somatic/fabricating who later turn out to have a physical condition that had not been identified.

Iloveeverytypeofcat. I read about the woman who died after complications from surgeries for EDS. So so tragic. There seems to be a very different attitude in the US to treating people with it, with surgeries seeming to be not at all unusual. Here surgery is the last resort after everything else has been tried. I need my sacro-iliac joint pinning but they are still dickering because of the iffy outcome of surgery in people with EDS.

sunshinebuttercups. It definitely seems harder to get a diagnosis for EDS after the criteria changed but I wonder if people self-diagnose more as awareness of the condition has grown. It’s good there is awareness though because it took till I was in my 50s to get diagnosed after a lifetime of dislocations, tendonitis, wounds that take forever to heal, skin that tears. I didn’t walk till I was nearly 3 and used to ask my Mum to go to bed after dinner at 6pm because I was so tired and she would try to persuade me to stay up longer. I was in searing pain after eating at times. Things were clearly not right from early childhood but no one thought anything of it other than I was a sickly child and everything was dealt with separately but more often just or ignored. As an adult the GP was often very dismissive but if a man had turned up with similar problems they’d have probably been sent for a whole load of tests. Chronic conditions in women are rarely taken at all seriously . It’s awful.

@TheDaydreamBelievers MUS, physically unexplained symptoms, non-epileptic seizures do not always have a psychological cause. One of the reasons behind the change from conversion disorder to functional neurological disorder was because there were patients where no underlying psychological problems could be found. These patients would get batted from neurology and psychiatry (and still often do) being told “not our discipline”.

There definitely is still a massive problem in medicine with the mind and body being seen as 2 separate entities when of course it is not as simple as that. Most illness have a bio-psych-social-elements.

I think we need to remember that Munchausens (or FII as it is now called) is extremely rare.
Women with chronic conditions causing all sorts of symptoms dismissed and left untreated by doctors? Extremely common.
Don't armchair diagnose. It is far more likely that people you know who seem to have endless symptoms are just being dismissed by their doctors and their chronic illnesses are going untreated than the very rare chance that they have Munchausens.

@coachmylife

When DD had a weird set of symptoms it was entirely clear that this was suspected by our GOSH team. I remain utterly horrified that they focused on me (as imagined perpetrator) and didn’t really investigate what was causing DD’s (admittedly bizarre) symptoms. Her condition is one that has been associated w FII, but that FII was the conclusion they leapt to (not a genuine medical condition) appals me. They had absolutely not one shred of evidence to do this - just the association.

Did you ever find out what was wrong with your daughter?

I've worked with plenty of parents on the wards who have been suspected

I still see it in medical notes.

I’ve met a handful of patients with the diagnosis. It’s often documented as co-existing with other conditions like pseudo-seizures, personality disorders, functional neurological disorder, fictitious disorder etc.

Yes I do, she completely destroyed someone’s life. Everyone seems to have forgotten about it now and she swans around running the village pub like she’s queen bee. She did time for it too.

[quote Lw87]@DontBiteTheBoobThatFeedsYou oh really? What is the new name for it?[/quote]
By proxy is the type Gypsie’s mother had. It’s where you pretend someone else is unwell to gain attention. People that have it often make their children unwell themselves, for example by giving them salt.

Just munchhausens is where a person pretends to be ill themselves, or or deliberately produces symptoms in themselves to gain attention.

I worked with a woman who I'm positive has it. Always off for mysterious reasons, always an excuse as to why she can't do something simple. But it wasn't just that, everyone in life was out to get her. She was incredibly manipulative and she works with vulnerable children 😳 so I don't know why she is still employed TBH. There have been some serious things she's done with evidence (eg a student admitting that she told them to lie about another member of staff to get them into trouble) and she's still there 🤷🏽‍♀️ a lot of these people are enabled by the system

I've been a carer for 20 years and i've known for sure that one woman had this illness.

I also had a male patient once that pretended to be blind. Has anyone else had that?

[quote Sunshinebuttercups]@TheDaydreamBelievers MUS, physically unexplained symptoms, non-epileptic seizures do not always have a psychological cause. One of the reasons behind the change from conversion disorder to functional neurological disorder was because there were patients where no underlying psychological problems could be found. These patients would get batted from neurology and psychiatry (and still often do) being told “not our discipline”.

There definitely is still a massive problem in medicine with the mind and body being seen as 2 separate entities when of course it is not as simple as that. Most illness have a bio-psych-social-elements.[/quote]
@Sunshinebuttercups I absolutely agree, and I'm sorry if I have been unclear in my post. As I said at the bottom, there is also a huge component of the cause just not being understood/known.

I would say to everyone that all ill-health has biopsychosocial components. Think for example of something so 'physical' as a broken leg. Your expectations for recovery (psychological) and level of support and home (social) have huge implications for recovery.

[quote Lw87]@StoneofDestiny it just came up on my suggested on YouTube! It's called Gypsys revenge.

I'd never ever heard of it before just watching this and it's heartbreaking. It must be so scary for medical pros as well[/quote]
Have you watched The Act? It's a series based on it with Patricia Arquette

@Clymene

I think it's quite common on MN

😂

Conversion disorder can also present similarly

Some people experience very physical signs of mental disorder and simply become fixated on those and don't believe that they could be in so much pain/ have such severe symptoms if it is "just" anxiety.

I've seen people for example who have such severe anxiety that they can't swallow and need special diets, or extreme tiredness that's left them bedbound so much they get bed sores, gastro issues needing peg feeding and being genuinely convinced they have cardiac issues

There's lots of interesting things that happen for example with high levels of adrenaline and how your gastro system reacts to that which are very real, there's also much higher incidences of Ng, NJ tubes etc in people with sexual abuse then control populations that doesn't appear to be linked to physical changes

Obviously it's a vicious cycle where the more anxious they become eg about being forced to eat, the more the gastro issues occur and convince them they were right.

Understandably people feel palmed off when gps say maybe it's anxiety, or when they can tell people have stopped investigating what's giving them symptoms. Sometimes people then interfere with tests in order to ensure drs continue to investigate, or don't just discharge them with no answers. Its not necessarily malicious or to hoodwink doctors but to feel that people understand how physically unwell they are

Yes, in a professional capacity

I think sometimes people can also mistake this for health anxiety. Some people are terrified either themselves or their loved ones are ill and will go to length to get them checked over. The major difference is their relieved to find they haven’t got anything serious but then almost immediately they worry about another potentially serious illness.

@Custarddreaming my friend who had MS and was initially told it was stress/conversion disorder always says her anger is not the misdiagnosis per se, but that how she was just fobbed off despite being so unwell. As she says, her symptoms haven’t change the doctors have just found an organic cause. A lot of her treatment now is focused on managing symptoms physiotherapy, psychology and OT and would all have been helpful even if there was not an organic cause.

They’re

@QuarantineQueen

I think we need to remember that Munchausens (or FII as it is now called) is extremely rare. Women with chronic conditions causing all sorts of symptoms dismissed and left untreated by doctors? Extremely common. Don't armchair diagnose. It is far more likely that people you know who seem to have endless symptoms are just being dismissed by their doctors and their chronic illnesses are going untreated than the very rare chance that they have Munchausens.

This with bells on.

It is rare.

And it is common for women who have legitimate concerns re dc to be dismissed.

This thread has made me really angry actually. I once heard someone say that a mother had caused a lung infection in a child because the mother had M by proxy, totally batshit.

Don't armchair diagnose, I agree.

@QuarantineQueen

I think we need to remember that Munchausens (or FII as it is now called) is extremely rare. Women with chronic conditions causing all sorts of symptoms dismissed and left untreated by doctors? Extremely common. Don't armchair diagnose. It is far more likely that people you know who seem to have endless symptoms are just being dismissed by their doctors and their chronic illnesses are going untreated than the very rare chance that they have Munchausens.

This in spades! Rare things are rare even for medical professionals, and people don’t always get diagnosed straigh away, especially if female. Not everything is FII

Two people I’ve known over the years, they seem to swap it to by proxy when children come along.

Be interesting to know if they’d still do it if we didn’t have the NHS

Yes, it is utterly terrifying. I have met several parents who have this with health but also a great many who do it with education and cause their children serious mental illness by obsessively pursuing diagnosis of learning difficulties. It's tragic.

Yes, and now thankfully the child is in care. But not because of it.
As a family we talked to social workers, and were ignored.
She was very proud of the fact that in her own words "I can make them (social workers/ HCP) do what I want" and she did for years, we were branded the problem.
I have no idea what damage she has done to her child, and I don't think its that uncommon.