A New Psychological Syndrome

Sickness or Sin?

An interesting article has appeared in the Guardian on a new Internet phenomenon where people elicit sympathy by feigning illness or trauma. Here is a case history so we all get the picture.

Anyone following her updates online could see that Mandy Wilson had been having a terrible few years. She was diagnosed with leukaemia at 37, shortly after her husband abandoned her to bring up their five-year-old daughter and baby son on her own. Chemotherapy damaged her immune system, liver and heart so badly she eventually had a stroke and went into a coma. She spent weeks recovering in intensive care where nurses treated her roughly, leaving her covered in bruises.

Mandy was frightened and vulnerable, but she wasn't alone. As she suffered at home in Australia, women offered their support throughout America, Britain, New Zealand and Canada. She'd been posting on a website called Connected Moms, a paid online community for mothers, and its members were following every detail of her progress – through updates posted by Mandy herself, and also by Gemma, Sophie, Pete and Janet, Mandy's real-life friends, who'd pass on news whenever she was too weak. The virtual community rallied round through three painful years of surgeries, seizures and life-threatening infections. Until March this year, when one of them discovered Mandy wasn't sick at all. Gemma, Sophie, Pete and Janet had never existed. Mandy had made up the whole story.

Because these people have to work hard over many months, sometimes years to construct their faux conditions psychologists are arguing that this must be a psychological disorder rather than a black joke.  So, to confirm that it is a disorder--an illness--they have coined a name, which makes it official.  "Münchausen by internet" is the illness.  It even has its own abbreviation which makes it officiously official: "MBI".

Some psychiatrists have started using the term Münchausen by internet (MBI) to describe this behaviour. Whereas Münchausen syndrome requires physically acting out symptoms to get attention from doctors, online scammers just have to be able to describe them convincingly. There's a potentially limitless audience of sympathetic ears, and success can be quantified by the number of concerned emails and message board posts generated by your lies. Some even go so far as to fake their own deaths, reading their own obituaries and observing the torrent of grief from the comfort of their living room. If they are rumbled – and they rarely are, conclusively – they just go to another support group, and to a fresh batch of trusting victims. The people they've fooled rarely find it so easy to move on.

The article makes the following points:

1. The elaborate, sympathy extorting hoaxes are not "victimless".  They can do damage to the hoodwinked.  This from the woman who finally twigged to Mandy's duplicity and exposed her:

She began providing the round-the-clock emotional support that Mandy craved. "I could spend an hour with her in the morning, a couple of hours in the afternoon, then I'd be up at night after the kids went to bed, sometimes until one o'clock. Instead of having a glass of wine with my husband in the evening, I was on the computer listening to Mandy talk about her latest infection," she says. "She was always on the verge of death. If I denied her and she died, then how would I feel?" . . . .

"She stole time from my kids and my husband, and I was able to be sucked in for so long because I couldn't fathom anyone making all this up for nothing. Why would someone want to hurt people like that? I'll never know."

2.  The lust for attention and being fawned over is like a drug.  Usually the scam follows a pattern of increasing illnesses, symptoms, emergencies, and degeneration to keep the sympathy flowing.

3. Women predominate--both in the phenomenon of Münchausen itself and its on-line extenuation.

While it's impossible to develop a profile of the typical support-group scammer, there's little doubt that women are disproportionately involved, both as perpetrators and as victims. This is true of both MBI and factitious disorder in general. Online self-help forums tend to attract greater numbers of women than men, so women are more likely to be drawn into such a scenario in the first place, but Feldman offers another explanation. "Jails are full of men who get their needs met in direct, pathological ways, and women tend to resort to behaviour that elicits attention in an indirect way."

4.  Münchausen clearly exists.  It clearly is a disorder.  By "psychologising" it so that it becomes categorized as an illness is a nonsense. Those who have had the "syndrome" and subsequently repent resent the idea that they are called "ill".

Whether feigning illness online or in the real world, fakers are often profoundly disappointed when they're told they may be ill after all. Many appear to prefer the stigma of being labelled cruel to that of being a psychiatric patient. According to Kanaan, this could be a false distinction. "There's confusion about where the line lies between being a bad person and being ill. Someone who's doing this, I'm afraid, could be both."

No, not both.  The dichotomy is not false.  No-one committed to truth and truth telling would be suborned into such behaviour. It is a manifestation of sin, not illness.  Such confusion only occurs in a culture which is naturalistic, where God has been banished from the collective frame of reference.

And then it begs a question: since all Unbelievers are likely evolutionists, why would they not celebrate this "syndrome" as an extremely inventive survival or coping mechanism--a sign of advanced, sophisticated humanity.