Munchausen Syndrome

Munchausen Syndrome is a psychological disorder that causes people to feign illness for attention. They often do this by poisoning themselves or hurting themselves in order to actually appear to have symptoms.

In some cases they'll even go so far as to involve other people, making them sick in order to capitalize on the attention of taking care of a sick child. This is called Munchausen's by Proxy. For all the details, see That Other Wiki.

Hollywood has taken this syndrome and exaggerated it to the point of absurdity at times. It's common to see it show up in medical detective shows and Lifetime movies.

Very closely related to Induced Hypochondria and Wounded Gazelle Gambit. Named after the same person as, but not often a character trait of The Munchausen.

See Playing Sick for the less pathological version.

Compare Hypochondria.

Examples of Munchausen Syndrome include:

Munchausen Syndrome

Anime and Manga

• Franken Fran has the five patients in "People of Unusual Tastes" that each kill themselves so that they can be treated and revived by Fran. They manage to even freak out Fran herself.

Literature

• Ethan Frome. Zeena has Munchausen Syndrome.

Live-Action TV

• An episode of House dealt with a woman with Munchausen Syndrome and the argument over if she was actually sick, or if all her symptoms were manufactured.
  • In general, it comes up as an early diagnosis from time to time. Of course, since every single episode has the Lethal Diagnosis trope in play, we shouldn't need to tell you how many of his patients actually have Munchausen's.
• The Australian Show Review with Myles Barlow has Myles reviewing sympathy in the second season. In search of sympathy, Myles lies and hurts himself.
• The mother in "The Masks" episode of The Twilight Zone was implied have Munchausen Syndrome. She complained about how she was braving through a serious illness to visit her dying father, and many other instances in the past were implied.

Munchausen's by Proxy

Film

• The Sixth Sense had the ghost of a little girl who had died after being poisoned by her mother in order to gain sympathy from outsiders. After her death, the mother turned her attentions on her little sister.
• One Missed Call has Munchausen's By Proxy as the Dark Secret of one character.
• In Repo! The Genetic Opera, it is revealed that Nathan poisoned Shilo to ensure that she wouldn't be able to leave him, subverting her status as the Ill Girl.

Literature

• Stephen King's IT. Eddie's mother uses Munchausen by Proxy to keep him under control.
• Another Stephen King example: Misery. Annie's treatment of Paul (and the babies she murdered as a nurse) has shades of this.
• In the Doctor Who Expanded Universe short story "Monsters", one of the eponymous monsters is the protagonist's mother, who has Munchausen's by Proxy. When the protagonist tries to tell her about the alien monster, the mother's response is to gleefully cart her off to a child psychologist.
• A particularly chilling example is Patricia Cornwell's The Body Farm, in which a teenage boy is murdered and a woman, instead of feeling sympathy for his parents, is jealous of the attention they get and thus kills her own daughter in order to get the same attention and sympathy.
• A large plot point in Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn.

Live-Action TV

• Scrubs. "Don't smother your kids".
• Criminal Minds had an episode where the unsub used his manipulation over his wife's health to prove that he had control over her living or dying.
  • Another episode had an Unsub who forced his own son to asphixiate himself via hanging himself, but that was no longer enough and he got his son to help him spread this over the internet as a "game", the hanging offering a brief high to those who manage to avoid strangling themselves to death (naturally, a few fail). Then the Unsub, who was a paramedic, got to arrive on the scene and play the hero by trying to save the ashyxiated teens. Hotch calls him a classic case of Munchausen by Proxy.
• Scully initially suspects the mother of a murdered child of this in The X-Files episode "The Calusari."
• Law and Order SVU had this exposed in a case that actually centered on a thinly-veiled Michael Jackson analogue. The parental figure of the accuser is the one proven to commit abuse of the child.

Web Original

• From the Things Mr. Welch Is No Longer Allowed to Do In An RPG list:

992. The rest of the party would appreciate it if I didn't take Munchhausen Syndrome by Proxy as a flaw.

Western Animation

• In Drawn Together, Princess Clara spends an episode caring for Wooldoor and making sure that he still needs to be cared for. The show even lampshades this by having the bottle of pipe cleaner she feeds him say "Not to be used for Munchausen by Proxy" on the label.