Topic for Aug. 16. ( Tue )

[Alex !]

Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy

Parents are biologically hardwired to protect their children from harm. That’s why Munchausen by proxy syndrome is such a chilling disease. Parents with this disorder create symptoms of illness in their children in order to get attention.

As a result, they do real harm to their children in order to fabricate symptoms. Moreover, the children may receive unnecessary and often dangerous treatments. Therefore, they can become seriously ill and even die.

For example, in one famous Munchausen by proxy case, a woman named Lacey Spears caused her son Garnett’s sickness. She poisoned him with salt delivered through a feeding tube. Hence, he died in 2014, at age 5. Subsequently, Spears was found guilty of second-degree murder. Furthermore, she was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison. This is just one of many similar cases.

Munchausen syndrome, considered a behavioral or compulsive disorder, is a serious mental illness. Hence, individuals with Munchausen’s experience severe emotional difficulties.

In addition, people with the disorder are not motivated by the desire for money or other material goods. In fact, they are primarily seeking attention. Therefore, they make up sicknesses that gain the attention of healthcare workers, friends, and online supporters.

In Japan, A 42-year-old woman was taken into custody by prosecutors Monday on suspicion of murdering her 7-year-old son in 2019 by suffocating him. The move came as police also look into the deaths of her three other children at an earlier date, all of whom also passed away at a young age.

Ayano Ueda, who describes herself as a nursing assistant, was arrested by police Sunday for allegedly suffocating her son Yudai by blocking his nose and mouth sometime between 8:45 a.m. and 3 p.m. at their home in Yamato, Kanagawa Prefecture, near Tokyo, on Aug. 6, 2019.

Investigative sources quoted her as saying the boy had chronic asthma when he was transported to a hospital.

They said it has been found that her eldest son and daughter died around 20 years ago, and another son passed away in 2017.

Police eventually suspected murder in Yudai's death given that his body had traces showing external force had been applied and after consultation with multiple doctors.The boy, a first-grader in elementary school, is believed to have died of hypoxic encephalopathy, or brain damage caused by lack of oxygen, according to the sources.

Ueda has denied murdering her children, and no reports of her abusing them were received by police.

But Yudai was temporarily placed in the custody of a child consultation center twice -- the first time before the 2017 death of Ueda's other son, and the second time afterward. On the second occasion, he was returned to Ueda's care as a result of a decision by a family court.

Another famous case is Stephen William Hawking.

It started as a news story with a lot of lines to read between - a cryptic piece suggesting the wheelchair-bound physicist Stephen Hawking had been the victim of a "serial attacker", perhaps even the victim in a bizarre case of Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome.

Hawking, who has motor neurone disease, was allegedly being physically and emotionally abused by his second wife (and former nurse) Elaine, 53. she had seen a rough and cruel Elaine bathe her husband in scalding water, call him a cripple, force him to wet himself even though she knew how much this upset him, throw him on the bed, and allow him to slide down in the bath until water entered his tracheotomy hole.

Hawking had been left alone in his wheelchair in the garden on the hottest day of last summer, causing him to suffer severe sunburn and sunstroke, and that they had seen nasty gashes on his face where he had been roughly shaved.

His first wife, Jane, who has previously voiced her loathing of Elaine, accusing her of being manipulative, went public urging the police to get to the bottom of it. "The revelations have made me feel ill . . . he is a special man and vulnerable man but when his children see the aftermath of these events they can only tell him he must do something about it,"