Sick Munchausen's By Proxy Analysis

“He slides his blade across my taut muscle like a bow to a violin. Please don’t do this to me. He has broken the seal of my body. Blood flows from the slit and rushes; staining, screaming across the cool white sheet. My mother is making it up.” This is Julie Gregory’s first-hand account of a surgery that her mother forced her to have, to find a heart condition that didn’t exist. Julie was abused by her mother throughout her life through social deprivation, nutritional and medical neglect, emotional and physical abuse. All due to her mother’s Munchausen’s by Proxy, a form of mental disorder and child abuse characterized by repeated visits to the doctor because of symptoms that were either intentionally caused by her mother, or completely fabricated. The idea of intentionally causing harm to your child is unfathomable to most parents; parents spend most of their time trying to keep their children out of harm’s way in any way possible, not purposefully hurting them. However, Julie’s mother would intentionally keep her out of school to see specialists, force her to have unnecessary, painful procedures, and try every
“I knew what my mother was doing to me was wrong, but I didn’t know who to talk to, or even what to say,” she says in her memoir “Sickened”. “I was a child, and she was my mom, people would have looked at me like I was being a brat, so I just followed ‘orders’”. Gregory did not know her mother’s actions were due to a mental condition until, at the age of 24, she returned to school and took a summer psychology course; “My body, sliced, diced, and probed away from me for nothing […] They just did the tests, never questioned any of it […] It was her all along.” Even then, she attempted to tell several people what had happened, but those she told either didn’t believe her, or told her it was the past. It wasn’t until Gregory told a mandated reporter, did any investigation into her parents