Münchausen syndrome by proxy

Münchausen syndrome by proxy (MSbP) is a more commonly known name for Factitious Disorder by Proxy where a person deliberately causes injury or illness to another person (most often his/her child). MSbP differs from FDbP in that it alludes to the motive of such behaviour, insisting that it is to gain attention, sympathy or other psychological benefit. Münchausen by proxy has been described by some as a form of extended child abuse. The motivation is to assume the sick role by proxy. It involves physical abuse and medical neglect.

The caregiver is usually a parent, guardian, or spouse, and the victim is usually a child or vulnerable adult. Most cases involve inducing physical illness.

General Information
Münchausen by Proxy syndrome is where an adult caregiver either makes a child sick by either fabricating symptoms or actually causing harm to the child whereby convincing not only the child but others, including medical providers, that their child is sick.

Some conditions or symptoms that may be faked by the caregiver or parents include failure to thrive, allergies, asthma, vomiting, diarrhea, seizures and infections. These symptoms are easy to fake because when a child goes into the doctor’s office the adult can just say that his or her child is experiencing these symptoms. This usually occurs during the preschool years.

Many experts feel this form of ill-treatment is driven not only by the attention that the child and parent/caregiver receive because of the diagnostic tests that must be run, but also the satisfaction of being able to deceive individuals that the abuser feels are more important or powerful than him or herself.

Münchausen by Proxy can have many long term effects on a child.

In some cases the child goes on to develop Münchausen Syndrome themselves, which is where they are likely to inflict injury upon themselves or fake illnesses. One of reason for this is that they seek the attention they received when they were in poor health. They may also inflict injury or sickness upon themselves so that their caregiver/parent will not leave them.

Initial description
Münchausen syndrome was first described in 1951 as when someone invents or exaggerates medical symptoms, sometimes engaging in self-harm, to gain attention or sympathy.

In 1977, pediatrician Roy Meadow, then professor of pediatrics at the University of Leeds, England, described the extraordinary behavior of two mothers. According to Meadow, one had poisoned her toddler with excessive quantities of salt. The other had introduced her own blood into her baby's urine sample. He referred to this behavior as Münchausen syndrome by proxy (MSbP).

The medical community was initially skeptical of MSbP's existence, but it gradually gained acceptance as a recognized condition.

Indications
Caution is required in the diagnosis of fabricated or induced illness (FII). Many of the items below are also indications of a child with organic, but undiagnosed illness. An ethical diagnosis of MSbP must include an evaluation of the child, an evaluation of the parents and an evaluation of the family dynamics. Diagnoses based only on a review of the child's medical chart can be rejected in court. The adult care provider who is abusing the child often seems comfortable and not upset over the child's hospitalization. While the child is hospitalized, medical professionals need to monitor the caregiver's visits in order to prevent any attempt to worsen the condition of the child. In addition, in most states, medical professionals have a duty to report such abuse to legal authorities. Warning signs of the disorder include:


 * A child who has one or more medical problems that do not respond to treatment or that follow an unusual course that is persistent, puzzling and unexplained.
 * Physical or laboratory findings that are highly unusual, discrepant with history, or physically or clinically impossible.
 * A parent who appears to be medically knowledgeable and/or fascinated with medical details and hospital gossip, appears to enjoy the hospital environment, and expresses interest in the details of other patients' problems.
 * A highly attentive parent who is reluctant to leave their child's side and who themselves seem to require constant attention.
 * A parent who appears to be unusually calm in the face of serious difficulties in their child's medical course while being highly supportive and encouraging of the physician or one who is angry, devalues staff, and demands further intervention, more procedures, second opinions, and transfers to other, more sophisticated, facilities.
 * The suspected parent may work in the health care field themselves or profess interest in a health-related job.
 * The signs and symptoms of a child's illness do not occur in the parent's absence (hospitalization and careful monitoring may be necessary to establish this causal relationship).
 * A family history of similar or unexplained illness or death in a sibling.
 * A parent with symptoms similar to their child's own medical problems or an illness history that itself is puzzling and unusual.
 * A suspected emotionally distant relationship between parents; the spouse often fails to visit the patient and has little contact with physicians even when the child is hospitalized with serious illness.
 * A parent who reports dramatic, negative events, such as house fires, burglaries, or car accidents, that affect them and their family while their child is undergoing treatment.
 * A parent who seems to have an insatiable need for adulation or who makes self-serving efforts for public acknowledgment of their abilities.

Prevalence by gender
One study showed that in over 90 percent of cases of MSbP, the mother is the abuser. In other cases, the MSbP abuser is often another female caregiver. Fathers have been the perpetrators in a handful of professional reports. The female preponderance may be attributed to socialization patterns that encourage females to seek the sympathy and assistance of others. Neuropsychological testing of perpetrators has shown either normal results or nonspecific abnormalities.

MSbP may also be attributed to another prevalent socialization pattern, which places females in the primary care-taking role. For a psychodynamic model of this kind of maternal abuse, see Anna Motz's The Psychology of Female Violence: Crimes Against the Body (Routledge, 2001 ISBN 978-0415126755, 2nd ed. forthcoming 2008 ISBN 978-0415403870).

These symptoms may be more prevalent in the parents of those with a learning difficulty or mental incapacity, and as such the apparent patient could in fact be a grown adult.

Controversy
During the 1990s and early 2000s, Meadow was an expert witness in several murder cases involving FII, some of which resulted in parents being wrongly convicted of murdering their children and imprisoned. In 2003, Lord Howe, the Opposition spokesman on health, accused the professor of inventing a "theory without science" and refusing to produce any real evidence to prove that Münchausen syndrome by proxy actually exists. It is important to distinguish between the act of harming a child, which can be easily verified (and there are plenty of cases to prove that it happens), and motive, which is much harder to verify and which MSbP tries to explain. For example, a caregiver may wish to harm a child simply out of malice, rather than in order to draw attention and sympathy.

The distinction is often crucial in criminal proceedings, in which the prosecutor must prove both the act and the mental element constituting a crime to establish guilt. In most legal jurisdictions, a doctor can give expert witness testimony as to whether a child was being harmed but cannot speculate regarding the motive of the caregiver. FII merely refers to the fact that illness is induced or fabricated and does not specifically limit the motives of such acts to a caregiver's need for attention and/or sympathy. There are now more than 2,000 case reports of FII in the professional literature. Reports come from developing countries that include, but are not limited to, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, and Oman. Dr. Meadow was knighted for his work for child protection, though later, his reputation, and consequently the credibility of MSbP, became severely damaged when several convictions of child killing, in which he acted as an expert witness, were overturned. In 2003, a number of high-profile acquittals brought Meadow's ideas into serious disrepute. Around 250 cases resulting in conviction in which Meadow was an expert witness were reviewed, with few changes. Meadow was investigated by the British General Medical Council over evidence he gave as an expert witness for the prosecution in the Sally Clark trial, where he asserted that the odds of there being two unexplained infant deaths in one family were one in 73 million. That figure was crucial in sending her to jail but was hotly disputed by the Royal Statistical Society, who wrote to the Lord Chancellor to complain. It was subsequently shown that the true odds were much lower, i. e., there was a much higher possibility of two deaths happening as a chance occurrence. In July 2005, the GMC declared Meadow guilty of "serious professional misconduct", and he was struck off the register for giving "misleading" evidence in the Sally Clark case. At appeal, High Court judge Mr. Justice Collins described this as "irrational" and set it aside. Meadow was involved as a prosecution witness in two other high-profile cases resulting in mothers being imprisoned and subsequently cleared of wrongdoing — those of Trupti Patel and Angela Cannings. Collins's judgment raises important points concerning the liability of expert witnesses — his view is that referral to the GMC by the losing side is an unacceptable threat and that only the Court should decide whether its witnesses are seriously deficient and refer them to their professional bodies.

In addition to the controversy surrounding expert witnesses, an article appeared in the forensic literature that detailed legal cases involving controversy surrounding the murder suspect. The Perri and Lichtenwald article provides a brief review of the research and criminal cases involving Münchausen Syndrome by Proxy in which psychopathic mothers and caregivers were the murderers. This article also briefly describes the importance of gathering behavioral data including observations of the parents who commit the criminal acts and references the 1997 work of Southall, Plunkett, Banks, Falkov, and Samuels.

Legal status in Australia and the UK
In most legal jurisdictions, doctors are only allowed to give evidence in regard to whether the child is being harmed. They are not allowed to give evidence in regard to the motive. Australia and the UK have established the legal precedent that MSbP does not exist as a medico-legal entity.

In a June 2004 appeal hearing, the Supreme Court of Queensland, Australia, stated:

The Queensland Supreme Court further ruled that the determination of whether or not a defendant had caused intentional harm to a child was a matter for the jury to decide and not for the determination by expert witnesses:

Principles of law and implications for legal processes that may be deduced from these findings are that:


 * 1) Any matters brought before a Court of Law should be determined by the facts, not by suppositions attached to a label describing a behavior, i.e., MSBP/FII/FDBP;
 * 2) MSBP/FII/FDBP is not a mental disorder (i.e., not defined as such in DSM IV), and the evidence of a psychiatrist should not therefore be admissible;
 * 3) MSBP/FII/FDBP has been stated to be a behavior describing a form of child abuse and not a medical diagnosis of either a parent or a child. A medical practitioner cannot therefore state that a person "suffers" from MSBP/FII/FDBP, and such evidence should also therefore be inadmissible. The evidence of a medical practitioner should be confined to what they observed and heard and what forensic information was found by recognized medical investigative procedures;
 * 4) A label used to describe a behavior is not helpful in determining guilt and is prejudicial. By applying an ambiguous label of MSBP/FII to a woman is implying guilt without factual supportive and corroborative evidence;
 * 5) The assertion that other people may behave in this way, i.e., fabricate and/or induce illness in children to gain attention for themselves (FII/MSBP/FDBY), contained within the label is not factual evidence that this individual has behaved in this way. Again therefore, the application of the label is prejudicial to fairness and a finding based on fact.

The Queensland Judgment was adopted into English law in the High Courts of Justice in Case No. WR03C00142 [A County Council v A Mother and A Father and X,Y,Z children] on 18 January 2005 by Mr. Justice Ryder. In his final conclusions regarding Factitious Disorder, Ryder states that:

In his book Playing Sick (2004), Marc Feldman notes that such findings have been in the minority among U.S. and even Australian courts. Pediatricians and other physicians have banded together to oppose limitations on child-abuse professionals whose work includes FII detection. The April 2007 issue of the journal Pediatrics specifically mentions Meadow as an individual who has been inappropriately maligned.

Münchausen syndrome by proxy involving pets
Medical literature describes a subset of MSbP caretakers, where the proxy is a pet rather than another person. These cases are labeled Münchausen syndrome by proxy: pet (MSbP:P). In these cases, pet owners correspond to caretakers in traditional MSbP presentations involving human proxies. No extensive survey has yet been made of the extant literature, and there has been no speculation as to how closely MSbP:P tracks with human MSbP.