I do not like the label Münchausen Syndrome by Proxy. It conveys no meaning in and of itself.
The label routinely began to be applied to a type of medical child abuse in families the late 1970s. The catchy descriptive phrase was used by the British physician, Dr. Roy Meadows, to capture the wild tale telling nature of the disorder.
At best, and without elaboration, the phrase conjures up an image of a man in a balloon basket (the Baron Münchhausen whose exaggerated tales of world travel were popularized in German popular culture of the 1700s) of who is placing a shareholder vote (a vote by proxy.)
The psychiatric community feels the same way as there is no such illness included in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5 ®); they use the term Factitious Disorder by Proxy. I do the same when I need to be totally accurate. Medical child abuse is also a term that is used but it is used more often by professionals involved in criminal justice or legal systems.
However the term often abbreviated as MSBP does conjure up images that pinpoint the type of behavior thanks to media usage of the term.
When I initially talk to someone who is not familiar with this unusual illness that often presents as a form of child abuse, I ask if the person has seen the movie the Sixth Sense. The depiction of the disorder in the film is very well depicted.
One of the dead people the boy with the sixth sense encounters in the film is a girl who guides him to a videotape that shows the mother of the girl as she adds poison to the girl’s food. The mother wears red to the funeral of the girl capturing the attention seeking nature of MSBP abusers. The scene in which the little sister is on a swing while two women speak about how the little one is now beginning to show the same signs of illness as her dead sister hints at the often serial nature of abuse within families.
I understood upon viewing the film when it was first released in 1999 that these scenes depicted Münchausen by Proxy abuse. This film actually helped me believe that the mention of this disorder by a therapist a couple of years prior to my seeing the film I had was off-base.
My therapist for a short time in the 1990s, Carol, had mentioned that a situation I described from my childhood sounded a bit like Münchausen by Proxy. I dismissed the suggestion as I, obviously, had not been killed by my mother.
I continued to believe for several more years that I was just depressed by my failure to find a rewarding job, or at least one that paid more than childcare and the costs I incurred when working outside the home, due to starting my career too later than I should have, while also experiencing the volatile hormonal fluctuations of a difficult peri-menopause.
Eventually in the early Autumn of 2003 I connected the cyclical depression I experienced to anniversaries of events in my childhood. A cascade of understanding tumbled down around me when I began to allow myself to think about my earlier life experiences outside of the rigid compartments in which I isolated distinct events of my life.
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