A woman in Ohio gave her daughter sleeping pills to fake chemotherapy, shaved her head, sent her to death councilling…all to keep her husband from leaving her. She conned her community into collecting several thousand dollars to help “pay” the medical expenses. This is just SICK!
My best friend had leukemia. It is no laughing matter. How DARE this bitch think she could ever be justified in drugging her daughter and making her believe she might fucking DIE OF CANCER, just to keep her husband? How horribly selfish can people be? Her husband should have left her a long time ago, and taken his daughter with him, because this digusting, horrible idiot does NOT deserve to be a mother!
This article says that this poor child is now 8 years old. I can only imagine how scared and confused she must have been, believing that her body was killing her, being told how to accept that, and then to be told that her OWN FUCKING MOTHER was doing this to her! Oh, she’s ready to face death alright - I only hope it isn’t by her own hand one day, because she has GOT to be seriously fucked up thanks to her moron mother.
Six and a half years isn’t enough of a punishment. I wish the prosecutors had been able to pin more on this bottom-dwelling shiteater than child endangerment and theft. There has got to be a worse punishment out there for drugging a child and making them believe they will die. ARRGHH!
I just can’t get over this. I wish I were more creative with explitives, too, but this post will have to do!
True. He might very well deserve a Pitting too. But the articles don’t really say, and I’d rather not assume anything about his presence, involvement, or knowledge of what was happening. I presume if he had been charged, the articles would have said something.
The mother, however…even in such short articles, there is enough information to thoroughly Pit her! Horrible, dispicable, hateful woman!!
I’m pretty sure this case first came to noteriety on the board about a year or so ago (can’t remember the OP alas) but it seems to be less criminally straightforward than the current OP and posters are claiming.
Ever heard of Munchausen’s-by-Proxy? Yes, it is sick. It is a psychiatric condition that is characterised by individuals seeking recognition through the attention that is given to their significant others (especially children) when they are ill.
It is an illness, a condition that needs treatment. It is not a manipulative device used by normal people.
No effin way. Munchausen’s “sufferers” may well be sick, but they know EXACTLY what they’re doing, and they don’t care. Treatment can come after the justice department slaps them sharply across the face.
Even though, as a nurse I’ve had to be “supportive” of yahoos like this woman, in my heart I’ve wanted nothing more than to slap them stupid. Of course that would be a step up.
And you’re right, they do know, why else go to such lengths to hide it?
I’ve cared for 3 children who were victims of their sick mothers. One ultimately died.
I’ve been involved in a… case… that involved MBPS (Munchaussen’s by proxy syndrome). These people are quite aware of what they are doing, and what the effects are going to be - what they seek is the sympathy of the community, the medical staff around them, and all that. Usually the second parent is a passive participant, or absent enough not to be aware of what’s going on. The parent involved actively in the malingering is quite aware of what’s going on, though they do succumb to a form of compulsion… but the compulsion itself has a very specific purpose: call sympathy and attention to themselves. For this, they usually started out in life by using themselves (Munchaussen’s Syndrome), and later their children (Munchaussen’s By Proxy Syndrome, or Munchaussen’s Syndrome by Proxy) and, in many cases, even their pets. They induce symptoms of illnesses that are hard to pinpoint in their child, and put the child through countless medical tests and often unnecessary surgeries, and often “doctor hop”. The child often “has” a really incredibly rare illness with vague symptoms, usually life threatening. Sometimes they will cripple the child or kill the child - death has often been the end result in many of these cases… some of which lacked the evidence to clearly tag the blame on a MBPS parent (though medical staff knows that’s what’s going on…)
In some respects, this form of mental illness is no different from sociopathy: sociopaths know exactly what they’re doing, and they don’t care. They’re doing it for the buzz, and law does not treat them as being “insane” in that they aren’t considered to have “diminished ability to function” as would, say, someone who is mentally disabled and has an IQ of 70.
This case does scream of MBPS in that it meets all the “symptoms”, so to speak. The one thing that bothers me a little, though, is that the medical community was seemingly not really involved in this case, which is a step away from the norm but is not totally unheard of.
The problem with this “disease” of the mind is that it’s extremely hard to catch the perpetrator in the act. In some hospitals, in the US, it has involved setting up cameras in some patients’ rooms to catch the perpetrators in the act of tampering with medication, samples, adding things into the saline solution, smothering their children to make it seem like they just “mysteriously turned blue and stopped breathing”… There are also documented cases of nurses and doctors in pediatric wards that were tampering with children’s medication and tests and such, to call attention to themselves as “rescuers”, angels of sorts if you wish… and it takes a lot of time before hospitals are able to catch these people in the act… and sometimes lots of dead kids before someone does something about it. Cases that come to mind include Beverley Allitt, from the UK, and Genene Jones of the US.
I truly don’t think it’s right to “go easy” on MBSP-affected perpetrators, just as I don’t think I’d really like to “go easy” on clearly insane psychopathic/sociopathic people who go out there and rape, maim, n’ kill.
If a stranger did such things to your child, they’d be up on criminal and civil charges. Because a parent does them, it’s excusable under the idea of “mental illness”?
I remember seeing one such “mother” on a talk show. When it was pointed out that her child was fine after being taken away from her and put in foster care, she insisted “No he isn’t. They just don’t know he’s still sick.”
MBPS is exactly what I thought when I read the article. But, no, 6 years just isn’t enough time to serve. Is the mother mentally ill? Yes. But so are paedophiles. You really can’t just say “Oh, a slap on the wrist will do; after all, she can’t help it”. I mean, what’s to stop this woman, after getting out of jail, from having another child that she can do this to? It’s scary.
This board is like fucking clockwork. There is no crime so heinous that someone won’t come in and defend the criminal in some way. :rolleyes: God forbid we admit that some human beings are BAD APPLES.
I have depression and anxiety, and it’s a condition that needs to be treated. I hope that stands up in court when I go batshit and shoot up my neighborhood next week.
Some human beings are bad apples–but I don’t believe we can tell who they are, and because of that I think we should do our best to help them all.
I think she should be punished, and that her child should be removed from her and raised by someone who is clearly sane, but I don’t think she should be destroyed with a long prison sentence, and I do think she should receive a generous amount of psychiatric care.
You honestly don’t believe it’s possible to see who’s a bad apple and who is not? I’ll go out on a limb and say Qusay Hussein was a bad apple. We can’t know them all, but I’ll be damned if a few aren’t brown and full of worms.
Mental illness are very real and very tragic, but they shouldn’t be used as an excuse to let folks off the hook for everything. Nobody likes issuing responsibility, I think, because we don’t want to think that a human being could act that way. Like Andrea Yates…so many people were saying “oh please god, make her crazy ill in some way so we don’t have to believe that she meant to kill those kids”. It’s hard to believe some people are bad people OR regular people doing BAD, AWFUL things.
Don’t you know that nobody is responsible for their actions any more :rolleyes: ?
A website trying to discredit MSBP can be found at www.msbp.com. They seem to believe that the children are actually sick, the parents are trying to help them, and anyone accusing them of doing anything wrong is evil.
No, I don’t know for sure that Qusay Hussein was a bad apple. He was obviously warped into someone capable of doing terrible things, but I don’t know with any certainty that becoming a better person would’ve been impossible for him. Sometimes even really fucked up people change for the better.
Were these comments addressed to me? If so, I never said she should be let off the hook. I explicitly said she should be punished. Calling for mercy isn’t the same as saying someone isn’t responsible.
We all have the ability to become better people. Some of us choose not to. That makes those people…bad apples. Are you saying Qusay Hussein was really torn inside as to whether rape dozens of women? If so, I’m not buying it. As you may or may not know, I was involved in quite a bruhaha when Qusay was killed. I, too, was heard to mention that he was once an innocent, five year old boy and that to dance around and raise a toast to his death was grotesque, but I also admitted that his crimes were heinous, and unforgivable, mental illness or no. Whether he was chronically depressed or not, women were raped and murdered at his hand. Bad apple.
Yes, my comments were directed at you. I have not suggested, nor would I ever, the death penalty or life in prison for the mother in the OP. She SHOULD get prison time because I believe she knew EXACTLY what she was doing. Letting her skate on some psych visits because of a questionable syndrome is irresponsible.
At a medical job I used to work at, we suspected one parent of possibly having MSBP. There were a lot of similarities - one child had died of SIDS (IIRC - they had another child who did have a legitimate health problem but died while in hospital care, and not due to any “tampering”), the parent was very persistent about something being wrong with the other child, the parent had called private ambulance services so often that apparently some would no longer go to their house, the parent was very vocal about the various health problems that the family’s children had endured, and would go on at length about them even to people not directly involved in the child’s care, and so on. There was an investigation but either this parent was cleared or nothing could be proven. At the very least, the consensus among the people I worked with was that this person was at least a “hypochondriac-by-proxy” due to the two deaths and only having one child left, and that the amount of stress that the parent and the past child deaths put on the remaining child probably resulted in vague psychosomatic symptoms.
[rereading that to be sure that there are no privacy violations… nope]
In the end, quite a few people thought that the problem here was just that this parent had not at all dealt with the other children’s deaths, and that the family desperately needed some kind of counseling pronto, but this parent was too wrapped up in the “immediate” things (the last child’s “illness” plus other issues involving the deceased children) for the advice to be taken seriously. This would then be an example of being a “bad” parent, but not one who is knowingly inflicting something on the child.
People with MSBP know what they’re doing, at least as far as anything I’ve read on the subject says. They know well enough that it’s wrong, such that they conceal their actions, lie about any sort of interference with the child. This understanding at the time of the action pretty much wipes out any chance of an insanity defense. Sociopaths were mentioned earlier - they know what the law says is right, but they don’t care. They lack a moral sense, and act solely out of selfishness. They also are smart enough to cover their tracks so they don’t get caught lying/stealing/killing/whatever they’re doing.
And someone who, today, “chooses” (I don’t know to what extent it’s a choice and to what extent it depends on circumstance) not to become better may do so tomorrow. We can’t know.
Nope, not saying that.
And I’ve NEVER said otherwise.
Didn’t say she shouldn’t get some prison time.
The claims of mental illness don’t really matter to me. I think the same oppurtunities should be extended to any criminal.
