Munchausens Syndrome by Proxy with Adult Victims - a text book case

We are all familiar with simple Munchausens Syndrome by Proxy - MSbP - as the mental illness that causes mothers and nurses to deliberately harm babies and infants in their care by such means as physically abusing or  injecting them with poison and then rushing the child to  emergency to earn praise for being so concerned about the child's sickness.  This is so common that doctors have to alert police and social services to children who they suspect have such a parent or carer.

Muchausens Syndrome by Proxy with Adult Victims - or MSbPAV - seems much rarer but may in fact be the correct diagnosis for many similar mental illnesses.

But although the possibility that some carers choose to harm adult victims has been mooted for many years there has never been a systematic study of how to spot such cases as all too often the man or woman with MSbPAV will use the deviousness of the condition to claim that the victim has produced their own symptoms!  In the past this has meant that many victims were forced to submit to the deliberate sadism of these carers with MSbPAV. 

Many of the reports of abuse in care home and mental facilities are undoubtedly due to the perpetrator having MSbPAV.

In this respect it mimics the sadism of Sadistic Personality Disorder and Control Freakism and I include checklists to compare these other mental illnesses and how to correctly diagnose MSbPAV.

I first came across Munchausens Sundrome by Proxy with Adult Victims some 4 years ago and having become concerned about the lack of information on this mental illness I present this text book case to illustrate how the condition is acquired, how deeply it affects the person with it, how it manifests, what triggers it to make them inflict deliberate injury onto their victims.

RXL

Munchausens Syndrome by Proxy with Adult Victims is such a rare condition it has no case histories to help the researcher, therapist or psychiatrist recognise the symptoms and then treat the disorder. Here is a sixteen point checklist that provides this long overdue help in combatting this strange mental illness.

Harold Shipman the British doctor who may have killed 250 patients before he was finally caught may seem to be the perfcet specimen of MSbPAV as his targets were all known to him to some degree as they were all on his patient list so he could murder them in his surgery or visit them at home and administer a quick injection of poison that had them die within minutes even right in front of his surgery assistants or the patients relatives. The vast majority of his victims were women.

He became so brazen that he finally just looked through his computer lists to choose a name at random and even though the person may have bene in perfectly good health he would visit them, apparently convince them they needed an injection then promptly jabbed poison into their bloodstream and had them die very quickly.

He finally succumbed to greed and forged a will of one of these healthy women and was caught but died without confessing why he had so callously deprived families of mothers and grandmothers.

On the face of it he seemed to be MSbPAV but as he ahd no intention of prolonging the harm to the victim he obviously wasn't.

But the person with MSbPAV must have a succession of victims over the years as the mental illness grows by what it feeds on.