The Controversial Disease with Illegal Symptoms

hello everybody today i want to talk about a mental illness that has led to several controversies in both hospitals and courtrooms this illness is not only hard to identify because of its unique symptoms but the very existence of the disease itself is often debated and that disease which we'll be looking at today is munchausen syndrome by proxy munchausen syndrome by proxy is an extension of another mental illness known as munchausen syndrome munchausen syndrome can most easily be described as faking your own illness in order to deceive others and already we have our first hang up with identifying the syndrome say you were to lie about being sick so you could get out of work or potentially win a lawsuit that's not munchausen syndrome that's just making a lie in order to get some certain objective whereas with munchausen syndrome the goal is the lie itself people who are diagnosed with munchausen syndrome will spend months or years of their life in and out of hospitals to try to convince those around them that they actually have a serious illness when in actuality they have either induced the sickness or symptoms on themself or are straight up lying about it altogether the name actually comes from baron von munchausen a fictional calvary officer from the 1700s who there were several folk stories about him riding on cannonballs and jumping to the moon and other tall tales in 1951 when richard asher discovered this syndrome he decided to name it after the stories of baron von munchausen because this is essentially people telling tall tales in the modern age the general symptoms of munchausen syndrome and the way to spot it in the wild is that the patient will never get better they will not respond to the regular treatment for the illness that they supposedly have they will be very knowledgeable about their treatment and will have a lack of visitors or people interested in their case at least most of the time as you can probably already tell there is a thin line between munchausen syndrome and just trying to get some benefit through a fabricated illness to the degree and we're going to look at examples of this munchausen syndrome is sometimes only defined by the value of whatever the lie can give now that's all munchausen syndrome right someone lying about themselves in order to get some benefit or attention munchausen syndrome by proxy which we're going to focus on today is all of that done to another person or in other words whenever someone induces or pretends that there is an illness in someone else so that they the caretaker can receive the attention the fame etc and if it really is a mental illness which will talk about the details of it today then the very presence of it implies the harm of another individual so today we are going to look at some of the most famous historical cases of this disease as well as the history of the legality behind it and asks the overall question is it even real i will also say the cases we'll be looking at today involve children so if that's something that you're sensitive to then you may want to skip out on this one but if you are interested in that stick around after the ad as we break down what is without a doubt the most controversial disease in modern courts and hospitals but before we get into that let me ask you a question when is the last time you felt proud about your breakfast choices that's what i thought see as a kid i was obsessed with cereals that had an unholy amount of sugar in them and now as a pretend adult i pretend to care about my health and always feel guilty whenever i fall back on those old breakfast foods well if you're looking for something that's great for you and tastes just as good i would like to introduce you to today's sponsor magic spoon magic spoon is the healthy breakfast option that contains 0 grams of sugar only 4 grams of carbs and 13 to 14 grams of protein per serving not only that but it's also gluten free grain free soy free and keto friendly and 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as always thank you for watching we're going to look at a bunch of examples of munchausen syndrome by proxy but i want to start out with what is considered by many to be the shining example of it and no not gypsy rose we'll talk about her later and that is the case of mary beth tinning mary beth tinning married her husband joseph tenning in 1965. she had her first child barbara in 1967 and her second child joseph junior in 1970. everything was going well until mary beth delivered her third child on december the 26th of 1971. it was on that day that her daughter jennifer was born with meningitis and brain abscesses because of these complications jennifer passed away one week after being born on january the 3rd it seems like this was the switch in mary beth's psyche that led to her later atrocities two weeks after this event she brought her second child joseph jr to the hospital saying that he was suffering from seizures and was constantly vomiting the hospital released him after a couple days because after putting him under surveillance nothing was wrong and he seemed to be a healthy child that same day on january 20th mary beth brought him back hours later because he had suffered a heart attack it was too late for the doctors to do anything and joseph jr passed away about a month later on march the 1st she rushed her first child barbara to the same hospital barbara was in a comatose state and mary beth said that she had been convulsing before passing out nothing could be done and after a few days barbara passed away with her official cause of death being listed as ray syndrome which is a disease of the brain in the span of three months mary beth had lost all three of her children but this wasn't the end of the story on thanksgiving day of 1973 mary beth gave birth to a fourth child mary beth rushed this child timothy back to the hospital a few weeks after he was born saying that he wouldn't wake up this fourth child timothy was dead and the cause of death was ruled as sids sudden infant death syndrome a little over a year later mary beth had her fifth child by the name of nathan and was declared dead after according to mary beth they were alone in the car and he began seizing then passed out in august of 1978 mary beth adopted a baby named michael and two months later had a daughter mary frances two months after mary frances was born she was rushed to the hospital for again a seizure before she was revived and allowed to return home one month after that she was brought back to the hospital again for a heart attack and died two days later in the fall of 1979 mary beth had her now eighth child jonathan and then a few months after he was born he was rushed to the hospital for a heart attack and died there after spending four weeks on life support and i know what you're thinking how does one person have seven children die under the same circumstances and no one thinks to ask any questions well you see it is true that there are certain genetic disorders that make it very hard for someone with those genes to live past a certain age the medical community around mary beth especially considering the first death in her family took place while the baby was being born in the hospital that the children simply had bad genes and weren't cut out to live for very long this theory was thrown out in 1981 when the same thing happened to her adopted son michael the then two-year-old child was brought into the hospital after he fell asleep and simply wouldn't wake up this was the first time that the medical community became suspicious of mary beth because up until then it was just a very tragic story of a mother who couldn't keep any of her children alive but now that an adopted kid died due to a supposedly genetic disorder that's when people started to look more closely at the case so then in 1985 whenever mary beth gave birth to her ninth child everyone was watching and waiting for the worst this child tammy lin was born in august of that year and sure enough in december was brought into the hospital after suffering a heart attack however this time rather than what they had previously done whenever the child comes in they see that the heart is stopped and they just declare it cardiac arrest they did a full autopsy looking over every part of the child's body and eventually came to the conclusion that the child had been smothered they then immediately exhumed six of the previous bodies in order to do full autopsies on them now that they had evidence although at that point so much time had passed that no conclusive evidence could be found and during the interrogation mary beth signed a confession saying that she had killed tammy lynn timothy and nathan although later in court she would say that she was coerced at doing this the prosecution essentially believed that she had murdered eight of the nine children with the first one jennifer that i mentioned earlier being the only natural death because the entire thing took place in the hospital and as i mentioned earlier was probably the catalyst for everything however she was only ever convicted for the murder of tammy lynn and was sentenced to 20 to life mary beth serves as one of the most famous cases of munchausen syndrome by proxy and i want to take a deeper look at that she liked the attention of people feeling sorry for her because she had lost her children she's an example of what we call the munchausen by proxy syndrome in which a parent uses or harms a child to get attention the core theory that was mentioned in the court and with most people that talk about the case is that during the death of her first child either she was damaged in some way or experienced such trauma that she became sort of addicted to the thrill of it all and the reason that she's touted as an example of munchausen by proxy is because she supposedly killed her children in order to achieve that thrill but if that's the case then how is it different than any other form of thrill killing obviously the definition of munch house by proxy isn't just anyone that kills for a thrill because then that would loop in any serial killer or cult leader that did the same things because they enjoyed it and if we narrow it down to say anyone that kills their own family for a thrill then that would mean anyone who hated their spouse or parents and killed them because they didn't want to be around him anymore would technically be munchausen by proxy you could even bring it down further to say specifically children but then that would mean that any case of filicide counts and also there are several other cases of munchausen byproxy that do not involve the family specifically it can be a caretaker looking over people in a hospital or even through parasocial relationships online where someone on the internet convinces someone else that they're actually sick i'm going to talk about the specific example and reasons that i feel this way in a little bit once i've shown more evidence but i don't think that this famous case of munchausen by proxy is actually munchausen by proxy see from the 50s when this was discovered to the early 2000s there was this huge push to call anything that involved child abuse a form of mbp which i'm going to call it from here on because munchausen by proxy is a long word and because of that there were several cases of someone just murdering their spouse or murdering their children where some psychiatrist would come in and say oh yes this is a classic case of mbp during the court proceedings mary beth said that the reason she killed her ninth child is because she was so paranoid and afraid that the child was gonna die that she kind of just wanted to get it over with which definitely points to some mental illness in her life but i don't think it was mvp see that's where the challenge comes with identifying this thing it seems that the nature of the disease itself is in the intent see as it's defined and as the more infamous cases exemplify again except for the mary beth one mbp is most often about control or the burnout that happens during the time that someone is made ill it is about someone affecting a domain that they have control over in order to maintain or secure a massive form of control on it the cases we're going to be looking at today are about parents doing that to their children primarily mothers but it can also be seen in cases such as whenever men have mbp to some degree it is most often in a cult or religious setting in which the leader establishes themselves as the most important aspect of someone's life and then makes them ill or physically diminishes them in order to ensure that the reason that 97 percent of munch housing cases involve a mother abusing their child is because that is the most clearly identifiable way to see that behavior for example i've talked on this channel about the anthill kids cult and how roche the role had tortured these people and literally cut off their limbs at points in order to maintain his status as their leader and father figure whenever you scale that dynamic down to a household that is most often what munchausen by proxy is and yes i'm saying that cult leaders are also a form of mbp but i guess we're just not ready for that conversation yet that is if we consider munchausen by proxy to be about control or at least control can be an aspect of it because the other big aspect of it that most people know is the idea of attention and while control is a massive element in that there at least has to be control in order to keep the facade going several believe that the primary incentive for mbp is the sympathy and attention that is given for this person with a savior complex who seems to be caring for an individual let's look at an example of that with lacy spears in 2009 lacey spears gave birth to her son garnet spears and only nine days later brought him back to the hospital she insisted that garnet couldn't eat and was in constant pain from there a cycle began of her bringing him to the hospital saying that he had all of these extreme illnesses that he needed minor surgeries for and when garnet was only eight months old he had a feeding tube put in because according to lacey she couldn't get him to swallow anything and when he did he would just throw it back up not only that but garnet had a surgery that closes off part of the throat in order to prevent someone from throwing anything up during this entire time she had a blog and a twitter account known as garnet's journey that talked about the details of garnet's stories in and out of hospitals over the years lacie and garnet went to dozens of hospitals with the primary story being that he has some kind of weird food intolerance that leads to all of his symptoms it was also believed that garnet had cystic fibrosis as his sweat tested positive for high concentrations of salt around the time garnet was five years old they began living at a holistic farm in new york state her stated reason for this being that he couldn't eat any processed foods so if they went somewhere that was all natural maybe he would be more okay however people around lacey became suspicious because whenever garnet was away from lacey he would eat a ton of food all the time ask for seconds and never seem sick however after spending any amount of time around lacey he went back to being an ill child one day in january of 2014 lacey rushed garnet to the hospital for seizures after spending some time in the hospital it was determined that garnet was completely fine and he was even jumping on the bed and running around and acting like a normal kid that was until an event that was later seen on security cameras of the aeg in the hospital room garnet and lacey went into the bathroom and whenever they came out garnet was incredibly ill he began seizing to which nurses ran into the room to try to help him but it was no use and garnet passed away the police were called when this happened because it was incredibly suspicious to the hospital that the perfectly okay kid spent a few minutes alone with his mother and is now dead also the police were more suspicious of her when after lacey's father showed up to the hospital see lacey's story was that the father of garnet was her fiance who was a cop who was killed on the line of duty so whenever the police are at the hospital and lacy's dad comes in they're like oh we're very sorry to hear about your son-in-law passing away you know being a police officer and all and the father was confused because um she never had a fiance and as a matter of fact the blake guy that she used pictures of and said was her fiance was a random cop that she went on a date with like seven years ago and if this wasn't suspicious enough lacey's friend received a call from lacey right after garnet died where she asked her friend to go to the apartment and throw away all of garnet's feeding bags because remember he was on a feeding tube so whenever he was with his mother he had to eat through one of the feeding bags when police walked into lacey's house it was all of garnet's medication on the table and a giant canister of sea salt right in the middle see as i mentioned earlier with cystic fibrosis one of the major symptoms is a high concentration of salt in someone's sweat and after was discovered that the feeding bags in lacey's apartment had insane amounts of salt in them something like 70 packets of salt lining the inside of the feeding bags himself it was determined that the reason garnet was sick for his entire life was because his mother was feeding him absurd amounts of sodium directly pouring salt into someone's feeding tube causes a plethora of health conditions which would explain why any time he was around his mother he was incredibly ill but it was determined that the final cause of death that killed garnet in the hospital that day was salt intoxication as a matter of fact his official cause of death was swelling in the brain due to a sodium overdose and in the hospital bed after she was arrested and there were search warrants on her phone and everything else they figured out that while she was in the hospital room minutes before garnet died she was googling on her phone things like salt poisoning and how much salt to kill someone and blah blah blah so she had been poisoned with salt for years in order to make him appear ill and cause symptoms that were distinguishable to some doctors as being part of cystic fibrosis so if she's telling the truth on that she's probably telling the truth about other stuff wrong with them and then they're in the hospital she overdosed him which ended up killing him here's the thing i don't think and i don't mean this in a morality way not like this exonerates her at all i don't think she meant to kill him that day from like a purely objective basis like essentially her son was her toy she used him in order to get clout online and to appear interesting and garner sympathy from strangers and all that and i think the reason she was googling that on her phone is because she was like oh man if we leave the hospital now and he doesn't look sick that's gonna look really bad on me so i'm gonna get him super sick like to the point of death and then they'll all believe me which is almost arguably worse to which she was convicted for the murder of her son and the judge during the court proceedings even said that she had munchausen syndrome by proxy instead of nurturing and protecting a beautiful child you subjected him to five years of torment and pain one does not have to be a psychologist to realize you suffer from a mental illness known as munchausen by proxy now looking at all the details of the spears case that is identifiable and easily seen as definitive mbp like down to the control aspect down to the attention aspect all of it now juxtapose that to a different case that is also often considered mbp like the case of blanca montano in 2011 she was convicted to 13 years of prison for the poisoning of her young daughter essentially she had been poisoning her daughter for years with e coli bacteria in order to make her sick and at one point even wanted a marrow biopsy done to try to determine what her illness was and was caught whenever she was seen again on hospital security cameras contaminating her daughter's food with e coli samples it was determined in the court trial that followed that she was doing this in order to garner attention from the child's father essentially they had hooked up and she became pregnant with the child and then he didn't want anything to do with her so she thought oh if my daughter gets sick maybe he'll come back while absolutely tragic and evil this is often considered a case of munchausen by proxy and i don't think it should be similar to the example i gave earlier about lying about having an illness or whatever in order to achieve an end goal this is just that with more heinous and longer steps and i think whenever you take something that is considered by some to be a legitimate mental illness and considered by others to be an excuse so to speak in legal systems and when you just kind of like flippantly apply it to everything like oh this woman murdered her kid that's mvp or oh look this girl almost killed her kid in order to get the kid's father back that's mbp it kind of becomes a meaningless term see if we look at it by just the specifics or symptoms so to speak that you can identify mbp through then blanca montano had all of the symptoms she had a ton of knowledge about the condition that her daughter had she had the multiple hospital visits she got into fights with doctors about it etc but the motive wasn't there someone who again i keep using the lawsuit example but it's the easiest someone who's trying to win a lawsuit against i don't know mcdonald's because they like got poisoned off a big mac i don't know why my brain went to that may do the same thing in a hospital in order to win a lawsuit but it doesn't mean they have munchausen syndrome to effectively narrow it down and this is more so the consensus in modern psychology circles it needs to be stated as the motive behind the thing that is happening and because of that you may be asking yourself or just in general if you think this video is dumb you may be asking yourself well why does this matter why does it matter what mbp is or if it's misidentified or given the wrong attributes or whatever like if it's just a means to an end then why should anyone care if someone poisons their child and we're all like oh but then they're like ah but they poison their child by proxy do we all go ugh and while it may not matter on an individual basis like if someone's poisoning their child then they're poisoning their child i don't care if they have like an affinity for it get the child away from them but where it absolutely matters is in legal cases because depending on how we define it and how we attribute it as a mental illness it could imply that it is a mental illness that the very presence of suggests that the individual is guilty think about it imagine if you have someone who is standing trial because they supposedly abuse their child and if the evidence is kind of in the middle and the jury's essentially hung on what the verdict is but then you have a doctor come in and say oh well they give the symptoms of having munchausen by proxy well then that would mean that the very existence of the mental illness means they're definitely guilty and as i mentioned earlier the very concept of this mental illness is a little shady in itself because if it is something that person is preconceived to then that would theoretically mean that they would have a more lax treatment in a court of law it's primarily the latter point as well as the fact that mbp is a rather recent discovery and has like you know circumstantial evidence at best for it existing that the american psychology association has never officially named it as a mental illness at least they've never named it by name but i'll talk about that in a bit that previous point that i mentioned that its presence implies guilt even if guilt is undecided led to a ton of controversy in the 90s and 2000s primarily due to a doctor by the name of roy meadow roy meadow was the doctor who kind of championed the idea of mbp and made it what it is today in modern courts and medical circles however that had some major consequences such as that of the case of sally clark in 1999 sally clark was convicted for murdering her two children during the trial the evidence was kind of circumstantial both of them had been found dead in the home supposedly they just quit breathing and similar to the mary beth story that i talked about earlier she rushed them to the hospital and both of them were dead however in the midst of this trial roy meadow comes forward as an expert witness and begins talking about how sally clark has all the symptoms of munchausen syndrome by proxy and how that means she was definitely likely or in favor to murder her children the jury thinking that this testimony was evidence of a motive convicted her for the murder of her two children three years later lab tests were done and it was determined that the children died due to a rare illness and then even more tragically due to all of the shame she received during this four years later sally clark died due to alcohol poisoning because of this roy meadow was hyper analyzed by the courts saying that maybe him showing up and accusing women of having this syndrome that he's really in favor of making a popular deal isn't the best idea and during the investigation of roy meadows two other women who were put away due to his testimony of mvp were let go after further results showed that they were innocent he had his license taken away from a year and then it went back but then he wasn't really asked to show up at any trials anymore but that in itself shows the harm that mbp can cause just by existing because if you have a case where it's undecided if the person is guilty or not and then you're like hey do you know that they have a rare mental illness that means they will definitely always hurt their child for attention how is that not gonna throw a jury's opinion it was because of this roy meadows drama that in uk and australian courts munchausen by proxy is legally not a medical legal entity medical legal that's a great word in other words within the courts of the uk and australia munch housing by proxy legally does not exist it can be used as a description of one's behavior but not as a diagnosis or entity itself the reason for this being mbp is essentially all the motive someone would need the example that the courts use is like this if you have a doctor who goes forward say there is a mother who murdered her child and the doctor is talking about how oh yes well the child was asphyxiated and this is the symptoms that prove it and this is the logical evidence that shows what happened to the child and blah blah blah that is all in the realm of physical facts and biological details etc but then if you consider mbp to be a mental illness and then you have the same doctor go yes and the mother absolutely has mbp that is the motive being shown through a kind of hazy technically factual mental illness meaning that a motive can be derived from logistics and that's why british courts kicked it out in other words it can ruin a trial because someone with mbp will always harm a child and also through this entire video i've used the example of a parent and a child because that's by far the most common example but like i mentioned it can also be done with things like religious groups or nursing providers or elder abuse etc but because of everything that i just mentioned if munchausen by proxy is real then it is an illness without innocence because if you have it then you've absolutely done the thing that you're being accused of and again this is the reasons that most of the courts kicked it out and there's the reason the united states is not even considered a mental illness however munchausen syndrome the one where you think that you yourself have the disorder is absolutely considered real and there are far more cases of someone pretending to be sick in order to garner attention and sympathy and what have you than there are of people doing it to someone else as a matter of fact the two are sometimes seen together as is the case with our next example we're going to look at hope yabara now hope had a history for lyon in the first place she was a chemist with a doctorate and in 1998 she told her husband that she was getting a quote one year phd degree to which on every tuesday and thursday for one year she would leave the house and i guess drive around and do whatever and then come back and say that she went to class after supposedly getting this phd she began to call herself phd hope yabara as well as put the title on business cards when again she never actually got a phd after her first daughter was born she claimed that the daughter had cerebral palsy not only that but for the first year of her daughter's life she said that she had an autoimmune disease and made her wear ankle braces however a year later when her second daughter was born prematurely that took all of hope's attention so much so that she simply took the braces off the first child and said that she got over it in 2001 hope said that she had been diagnosed with bone cancer and for the next eight years began to perform acts that showed symptoms of the illness she would leave the house and shave her ed and eyebrows and tell people she was going through chemotherapy she would make up stories about how it was spreading to other parts of her body but was leaving in some areas and constantly kept her health in a sort of teeter-totter she moved to alabama for eight months saying that the region had a special treatment that was only available there she even learned sign language and had a cochlear implant installed because she said that the cancer was affecting parts of her brain and was eventually going to cause her to lose her hearing she even had this entire story that she was pregnant she told everyone else around her that she was pregnant and for five months wore maternity clothes said they were twins and even had names picked out for him before one day saying that the chemotherapy caused her to miscarry to which with no one else around she had a quick funeral for them place them in urns and then put the urns on the fireplace the urns were sealed by the way and after everything i'm about to talk about happened they broke open the arms and they were just empty remember the second child that i mentioned the one that was born prematurely well at a young age hope had a feeding tube installed in her second child getting a g-tube a gastrostomy tube to feed the child is the most common procedure in medical child abuse and that's because it's probably one of the easiest disorders to fake to a physician so you present with a feeding issue with your child well we're not watching the child eat in our clinic and just as with the spears case began to feed her daughter's salt and then doctors believed the child had cystic fibrosis she even had an intravenous central line put in on that daughter which is essentially an iv that goes up to or into the heart and it's believed that she began removing bits of her daughter's blood in order to make her appear anemic during one procedure called an iron dextrin infusion which is something they do with dangerously anemic people to try to put iron back into their system the daughter nearly died because again they're trying to flood iron into a system that for one doesn't need it and is also lacking on blood and if it wasn't for the doctors quit working she would have died of metal poisoning right there see hope was also a chemist and because of her fake phd which i have no idea how no one certified at any point during this she had a position at a pharmaceutical company working with pathogens the way she was found out is because people at work got suspicious that she was ordering pathogens that weren't being used in the lab she was eventually caught for this after it had gone on for 10 years and she was arrested for child abuse and misusing justice and lying to hospitals and a whole bunch of other minor charges she still keeps up the compulsive lying thing to the degree that in one of the interviews i watched with her whenever she walked up to the interviewer she had a piece of paper that said she was deaf or hard of hearing and like in the beginning of the interview was doing sign language and had like a speech impediment but as the interview went on she just quit doing that [Music] factitious disorder or munchauses is when someone exaggerates veins or some people would call it malingering an illness or creating an illness who doesn't exist so at the very least hope was a compulsive liar which begs the question is munchausen syndrome by proxy just some form of elaborate compulsive line and i won't spend as much time disproving it as i did the thrill kill argument but in short no see there are people who are compulsive liars who don't do things like destroy the livelihoods of family members and then poison their children for a decade so while that is definitely an aspect in mvp because it requires some level of dishonesty there's something more to it than that there is something else to the level of depravity that these people will reach to and also in case i haven't made it clear enough because i'm kind of just playing devil's advocate on every side of the aisle at once i am not trying to state in this video that it definitively is a mental disorder or isn't or whatever i'm just more so trying to show the points of it and while there are proponents on both ends and the most definitive point that i'm trying to get to you in this video is that it is an interesting point of contention within medicine and legal systems that i think deserves to be looked into and also in case it's not clear enough i am a youtuber who makes videos about stuff that i think is cool and neat and not a doctor or a psychologist at all so just clear everything up here do not take the things i say in this video and then use them as a justification to label people or talk about like what someone may or may not have because that would be not good again just taking something that i think is interesting and worth talking about and showing that to you guys so while i'm on the high horse of being a guy with a camera and youtube channel who thinks i can classify mental disorders let's talk about jack baron jack baron murdered his wife and then at the funeral seemed to be garnering and loving the attention from everyone as well as cashing her life insurance policy before doing the same thing with his two other children he seemed to be so comfortable with the deaths of those in his immediate family that at the second child's funeral he wore a t-shirt and just drank beer and like casually talked to his friends and it is a point of debate if he was doing it because he liked the attention or if he hated his family or if he liked the life insurance policy and again while this is a combination of attention control and wealth that is garnered through doing bad things to members of your family i don't think this is munchausen syndrome by proxy again everyone touts it as such if you search guys with mbp he's one of the first stories that'll pop up however again if we take what is potentially a very diverse or specific disorder that can be attributed to some people and just say anyone that murders someone to get a life insurance policy counts as it then it's a meaningless term and again my purpose with all of this isn't to say yes it is a mental disorder because that would imply some level of alleviation or predisposition to the things they're doing and in every one of these cases i feel that the individual in question was absolutely capable of moral decisions or at least if they weren't it's not related to the mbp but where i feel it is more important is with the condemnation of those same behaviors in other words maybe if we don't look at it as a mental illness and we look at it in the way that british courts describe it as as a description of behavior then perhaps it should be used to condemn those who match the description and if we're using that definition that it is not necessarily a mental illness but instead just a pattern of behavior then i believe that one of the best examples of why someone with mbp should be condemned and actions against them could be justified is that of the most infamous munchausen byproxy case probably ever now which is the case of gypsy rose blanchard dd blanchard gave birth to gypsy rose blanchard in 1991 at only three months old deedee took gypsy to the emergency room saying that she was suffering from sleep apnea although there was no evidence of this at a young age dd began to tell people that gypsy had chromosomal disorders muscular dystrophy and a series of other conditions that caused her to be very sickly and require a walker at eight years old gypsy was on the back of a motorcycle being driven by her grandfather to which the bike gently tilted over and gypsy scraped her knee from this didi said that gypsy's legs were destroyed and that she now had to set in a wheelchair and from there dede began showing off gypsy everywhere they went to special olympic events they went to pageants for disabled children and sometime between kindergarten in the second grade dede pulled gypsy from school in order to homeschool her every single minor thing that was potentially not even wrong with gypsy caused dd to immediately rush her to the emergency room to the degree that if gypsy coughed that that's a trip to the er right away dede also began saying that gypsy was suffering from eye and ear problems which she also didn't have and dede was able to put gypsy on various medications for things such as seizures dd and gypsy were victims of hurricane katrina and because of it they lost their homes as well as all information about their previous lives because of this dede was able to change their names and fabricate an entire medical history as a matter of fact her name wasn't even dd blanchard that's a fake alias she gave herself in order to get in and out of hospitals her real name was claudine pitchery and from there they became a massive news story see to everyone else who was watching gypsy was a child with various medical problems who lost her home in hurricane katrina and because of this they had a house built by habitat for humanity they had several stays in the ronald mcdonald house they went to several miranda lambert concerts and got to meet miranda lambert because of make-a-wish and the make-a-wish foundation also sent them to disney several times during this entire time gypsy's father kept wanting to come meet gypsy and dede just told him not to come around and stay away normally by lying and having to reschedule and other complications but at the same time dede was telling everyone else that gypsy's father was an abusive alcoholic who they were in hiding from whenever dede was eventually confronted by the police about changing her alias her story was that they were hiding from gypsy's abusive father so they changed their name in order to protect himself she would also do things like shave gypsy's head as well as even lie to her about her own age like on gypsy's 18th birthday her father called to wish her a happy birthday and dede said don't tell her that she's 18 she thinks she's 14. and everywhere they went in public didi would attach a feeding tube and oxygen tank to gypsy's wheelchair keep in mind through all of this she didn't need any of it and was perfectly capable of walking and dede simply managed to make gypsy play along through physical and verbal abuse gypsy would later say that anytime they were in public and she would say something that implied she wasn't that sick her mom would squeeze her hand or kick her under the table and then whenever they got home would physically beat her with a coat hanger or yell at her saying that she was being a terrible daughter there were various minor surgeries too that gypsy didn't need she was given such as a bar placed in her mouth because the seizure medication she was taking caused her to lose her teeth her salivary glands were removed because her mother said that she was over salivating which according to gypsy later every time they'd go to the doctor dede would rub like this tar in her mouth that would make her salivate more so her salivary glands were removed she even had tubes implanted into her ears for drainage which again she didn't have the first and only real backlash dede got during any of this was one neurologist who examined gypsy and then told the mother this child is perfectly capable of walking and the mother got offended and walked out as well as an anonymous call that was made in 2009 to the police department saying that dede was not her real name and also she is just making the child pretend to be sick and she's not actually sick to this day no one knows who that call was but whenever the police went to dede and confronted her the police said that yeah this looks like a sick kid and then dd gave the whole story that they were running from an abusive husband and the police just didn't look into it anymore things began to culminate as gypsy got older as a matter of fact one of the only things that gypsy had any say in was her internet activity one year she went to a convention and hooked up with a boy that she had met online dd found out about this and threatened to report the boy to the police if he ever said anything to gypsy again because according to dd gypsy was a minor at the time even though she really wasn't after they got home from this event gypsy said that her mother smashed the computer with a hammer and then for several weeks handcuffed gypsy to her bed after this gypsy began to plot how to get away from her mother and every night after her mother went to sleep would talk to people on the internet it was during this time she met a man by the name of nicholas and they began i can't believe i'm using this word e dating and after one meet-up where they actually met each other in person in june of 2015 they decided that nicholas would murder gypsy's mother to which one night nicholas broke into the house stabbed edie to death and nicholas and gypsy then escaped during this escape was also the first time that gypsy had been in public without her wheelchair since she was eight years old eventually the two of them were caught nicholas getting the brunt of the punishment as he was the one who actually carried out the murder with gypsy being sentenced to 10 years in jail while speaking about her mother in an interview she did with buzzfeed in 2018 gypsy said she would have been the perfect mom for someone who was actually sick so again speaking overall about mbp if it does exist then dd blanchard is the textbook case she managed to control every aspect of gypsy's life she benefited from it financially and she garnered all the attention she wanted during this time not only that but she didn't kill her daughter and seemed to continuously use her as a tool to achieve her desires so if this is the true undeniable case of mbp then let's ask ourselves if mbp serves as a mental illness does that exonerate deedee from what she did to her daughter no there are absolutely cases with mental illnesses where someone does wrong things because they're either incapable of stopping themselves or controlling themselves from those urges or they're just incapable of justifying or determining what is right or wrong however even if you view munchausen by proxy as being a mental illness didi was capable of knowing that what she was doing was wrong hence the series of hoops she jumped through in order to lie about family members and lie to the police and lie to doctors etc she was not incapable of discernment as a matter of fact she was really good at discernment because she knew exactly what traits to hide and what traits to exhibit like care and love for her daughter so if we go off of this as the ideal case of mbp then we can agree with the courts and say that it is not a justification for behavior but perhaps a motive for one so if dede essentially knew better and it wasn't something that overcame her and she followed her own selfish desires in spite of knowing what was wrong then in that case mvp absolutely serves as a way to condemn certain actions if it's a way to describe a particular pattern of behavior in a person then it can certainly be decided as a motive for legal actions as a matter of fact in american judicial systems this is kind of the take that's currently being used the name it's given in american legal systems is fabricated or induced illness by caregivers that's not as cool as munchausen syndrome by proxy but it's the same idea because it's not used to describe a syndrome or a mental illness instead it's describing a behavior an induced illness by a caregiver i've seen a number of these they don't give the child the proper medicine and they keep going to the doctor and telling the doctor you're not trying hard enough you don't understand my child here are all the symptoms they're having and the doctor's puzzle and of course most doctors and most professionals and most people don't even consider the fact that they're feigning this illness so if we look at that fabricated illness by caregiver which is abbreviated to fic and since mbp and fic are the same thing at least in a legal aspect or as we decided from this point of conversation that it is not a mental illness and since dd blanchard exhibited fic the big question is does that justify the actions of gypsy yes in a perfect world people who were bad would be punished for being bad and people who were good would be punished for being good however the world isn't perfect so there is a series of legal ramifications and set rules in place that are put up by establishments of man yadda yadda and because of the very nature of that of the idea that we are taking a humanity that is different compositions of gray and making them get in single file lines of black and white legality there's always going to be overflow in one camp or the other so that being said gypsy rose did nothing wrong like legitimately this is no different than uh someone who's in an abusive relationship for years and constantly being beat and tormented and gypsy had been putting up with years of physical and mental abuse and surgery she didn't need and forced to sit in a wheelchair and again i know she did the murder and it wasn't technically an immediate defense of her life but it was absolutely in defense of her life like if you were in your house and someone comes up to you and they point a gun at you and you shoot them first that's obviously self-defense right but if you were in your house and you were like getting water from your refrigerator and there's a guy on top of the fridge and he's pouring like poison into the water filter of the fridge like are you just supposed to be like oh man i guess i'm dead now like i don't care if it's not a physical immediate attack and yeah i know the logical solution is gypsy should have just stood up and went and told someone but that's kind of ignoring all of the aspects of you know stockholm syndrome and physical and verbal abuse itself gypsy was absolutely in fear of her life and i think it's ridiculous that the legal solution for everything is that she would just sit there until she died also to give you an idea of how hated dede was whenever dede died she was cremated and her ashes were sent to her father and stepmother and they flushed them down the toilet her own father flushed her ashes down the toilet that's how despicable of a person this was so you know not only did gypsy save herself but she also did a net positive by you know speeding up the whole life thing for someone who was clearly not appreciative of theirs so while in the poster child case of munchausen syndrome by proxy i do not think that it justifies the actions of dede the one committing the case but i feel it absolutely justifies the actions of the proxy itself that being gypsy if we view it as a mental illness or at least not a mental illness to the degree that it disables someone's ability to determine right or wrong then in specific cases like this where it's essentially a very slow murder carried out over the course of years or even decades then i think it's perfectly reasonable for the proxy to decide that it wants to stop being a proxy but at the end of the day i am a guy who is telling you about this on the internet because i think it's interesting and the truth of the matter is i don't know and a lot of people who are experts in this field don't know as well it is still being debated in medical circles if munchausen syndrome by proxy can be viewed in the way munchausen syndrome is in that it is an explanation for certain behaviors and possibly a justification for some and while most have put away that idea it is still debated if it should even be allowed to occur in any legal space as the very existence of it implies guilt and on top of that should it throw a case because if it is something that can cause an individual to carry out these heinous acts well then maybe it's good to have a motive to tie in that can prove if they're guilty or not these are all big questions stuff that is still being debated and not a lot of people really talk about and while it's always interesting at least to me to look at cases of this and try to understand human psychology and where everyone's coming from and the arguments around it i think there is another point of interest here apart from most of my videos because we're kind of in the conceptual stages for what could be eventual decisions when it comes to cases of child abuse or elder abuse or what have you ten years ago munchausen syndrome by proxy was a definitive surefire thing that if someone had it lock him up straight away and now it's kind of in the back and forth of if it's even a mental illness or not and 10 years from now it could be something completely different i wanted to bring all this to you today because it is active developments in the realm of legality and medicine and i think that that's pretty interesting not the you know abuse and child murder part of it the socio-political implications of it and hey hopefully you got something out of all of this as i certainly did researching it and telling you about it and i had a great time and hopefully you had at least an okay one and thank you for watching i also want to say off the bat there is a fantastic video by the internet investigator called munchausen by internet which is about someone who convinces other people online and is convinced online that she herself has several physical disabilities and i really wanted to find a way to mention that video in here but the only time i really mentioned munchausen syndrome was in relation to munchausen syndrome by proxy so it didn't really fit there wasn't a place to bring it up but right here i want to say it's a great video i'll link it below it's really cool she does a great job with a lot of her stuff so yeah i just think that it's a good video so you should check it out if you're interested in this one because munchausen syndrome like i said is a much more clearly defined thing people fake their own illnesses in order to receive attention or what have you sometimes just for the essence of being near hospitals or in caregiving positions um but it's whenever it's done to someone else because now there's an act of violence involved um instead of just someone harming themselves in order to get attention or whatever it is someone hurting someone else for attention and that throats all the cards off the table because now we're talking about acts of violence and potentially murder in some cases and blah blah and i've talked about this long enough i'll shut up now uh but thank you for watching if you stuck around this long to my insane rant um this one was actually interesting i will i started this out just like oh i'll just talk about a bunch of cases of munch housing by proxy because i think it's interesting and then i come across all these court records and stuff about how like right now it's contested if it's even a thing or not and the video kind of morphed into well how about i talk about the nature of it itself and i'll use these cases i was researching as evidence or as not evidence essentially examples from either side of the aisle about you know munch housing syndrome by proxy itself and i'm a little nervous right now i'll admit uh before editing this or anything because i did a lot of rambling and i went a lot of different directions there i've been recording for two and a half hours now no idea what this will cut down to because for one there were several rambles that i'm probably gonna have to cut and there was also several just periods of silence where i would be mid-sentence and be like where do i want to turn this point to so in other words right now i have no idea how this is going to turn out it could be the worst video i've ever made i'm a little worried um but i guess you guys know more than i do right now so let me know how it went i guess um man that's bizarre me right now doesn't know you in the future even though for you it's the present how anyway enough of that esoteric stuff um my brain is fried [Laughter] thank you all for watching um if you stuck around this long thank you so much to all of my patrons i guess you're still the patrons to me even though you're technically former patrons because the patreon is gone now um but your names are here so thank you my patrons my top tier patrons for establishing all of this and allowing this to continue to the degree it has and it really does mean a lot so thank you for that thank you so much to my subscriber i think is my subscriber my one subscriber my subscribers i think we just hit 1.1 million so since the 1 million since you know that plaque got sent and all that stuff it's now been another uh 100 000 people which i'm still amazed that two people watch this channel uh and my mom's one of them much less 1.1 million like my word um wow and i just did that whole random rant about the legitimacy of a court preceding illness medico whatever anyway i'm going if anyone runs this channel into the ground i'm gonna do it myself like a man uh but thank you all so much for watching uh i'm trying to think if there's any announcements a lot of cool stuff coming down the pipeline uh subscribe to when to gang the second channel it's linked as always if you're interested in that um but because i'm going to be doing some cool stuff over there you'll see but if you're interested in second channel stuff go over there because it's going to be more than just gaming content um i think that should about do it i've got some cool projects down the pipeline but not ready to talk about them yet but exciting stuff happening but for now i believe that should do it so thank you for watching i hope that you enjoyed and i will see you in the next one bye

Channel: Wendigoon

Views: 2,075,758

Keywords: iceberg, explained, scp, analysis, breakdown, scary, spooky, horror, creepy, comedy, funny, laugh, humor, cringe, intel, deep web, dark web, hidden, tier list, secret, top ten, top 10, countdown, compilation, meme, memes, meme compilation, internet horror, reddit, ask reddit, redacted, childhood, trauma, Mary Celeste, Flannan Isles, Eilean Mor, Island, Lighthouse, Kaz 2, Kaz II, Leviathan, Kraken, Ocean Monster, conspiracy, theory, mystery, sci fi, true crime, unsolved, panic, crazy, munchausen, syndrome, by, proxy

Id: oMlJjWKIaBY

Length: 60min 27sec (3627 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 21 2022