The early release of Gypsy Rose Blanchard — who was sentenced to 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to her role in the murder of her mother, Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard — has thrust Munchausen’s disorder into the spotlight.
Gypsy, 32, says the disorder was caused by her mother abusing her mentally and physically, subjecting her to unnecessary medical procedures to the point where Gypsy felt killing Dee Dee was her only escape option.
Munchausen bystander — sometimes called factitious disorder, according to the Mayo Clinic — was “first described in 1977 to describe children whose caregivers (most often mothers) create medical histories for their children and who support such histories with fabricated physical signs and symptoms, or even by changing lab tests,” Dr. James Schneider, chief of pediatric intensive care medicine, Cohen Children’s Medical Center, tells PEOPLE.
“It also comes into play in situations where an adult caring for a child causes injuries, so this is a form of child abuse. It can also occur in an addicted adult,” Dr. Schneider tells PEOPLE.
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Gypsy Rose Blanchard.
Gypsy-Rose Blanchard-Anderson/Instagram
“The terminology commonly used for this condition is ‘medical child abuse,'” adds Dr. Schneider, “because of the potential or actual harm the child suffers.”
Munchausen’s is “considered by authority to be a psychological disorder, although the exact cause is unknown,” Dr. Schneider tells PEOPLE. “The guardian generally does not benefit from acting out or harming the child. They may seek attention as motivation.”
But to be clear, he says, “The child is the victim of this disorder, where the caregiver is the perpetrator.”
As Gypsy told PEOPLE, “It was panic, desperation,” that made her decide to kill her mother. “I was facing another surgery soon and I really didn’t want to go through with it,” she explained.
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For years, Dee Dee subjected Gypsy to unnecessary medical procedures and convinced her daughter and others that she had a variety of illnesses. This follows what Dr. Schneider — who did not treat Gypsy or her mother — tells PEOPLE about how those with Munchausen by proxy often interact with medical professionals.
“Many of the symptoms in a child are nonspecific and often depend on the caregiver’s report (ie, gastrointestinal symptoms like vomiting or diarrhea), but symptoms can be based on the clinical findings of a child who has an illness or injury,” he says.
“Symptoms involving any organ system can be part of a patient’s presentation. Some warning signs,” he explains, “include when the medical history is inconsistent with the observed clinical findings, when the history given by different caregivers is inconsistent with each other, when the illness is recurrent or prolonged, unusual or does not respond to appropriate treatment as expected, when the child has been examined by many doctors for the same unusual complaint without any solution and when the symptoms appear only in the presence of a particular guardian.”
The syndrome has made headlines before — such as when Eminem accused his mother, Debbie Nelson, of having the disorder in his 2002 hit “Cleanin’ Out my Closet.”
In it, Eminem raps about being a “victim of Münchausen syndrome,” adding, “I’ve been made to believe I’m sick all my life, when I’m not.”
The lyrics prompted Nelson to file a defamation suit against his son.
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For Gypsy, the case was so difficult that she felt like she had no other way to escape.
“It’s not like I didn’t think about every other possibility besides murder. I am,” Gypsy told PEOPLE. “No one will ever hear me say that I’m glad she’s dead or that I’m proud of what I did.”
She added. “I regret it every day.”
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Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education