The innocence of a child is something beautiful and ethereal. Children, in all their purity, look up to their parents with undeniable trust and devotion. The parent is the caregiver, the person the child turns to for unconditional love. But what if this unconditional love is brutally turned on the innocent and this ‘love’ just about leaves the child for dead?
Munchausen’s Manipulation
You are just a child while you look up to your mother with absolute devotion, worship and love. She takes your small body into her arms and cradles you while humming your favorite nursery rhyme. You close your eyes and get ready to drift off into lands of slumber.
Then you feel it. A sting, a sharp stab pierces your vein. Things become hazy and colours swirl from blue to green to grey to black.
You wake up now. Colours fade from black, to grey, to green to blue and then once again to that familiar clinical white. The white walls, the white bed sheets, the doctors and nurses dressed in crisp white… you are in the hospital again. You are scared for your life again. Mom told you that you were sick. Mom told you that you were dying. She cries over you while being held by one of the nurses. She doesn’t hold you. You close your eyes and sleep once more.
Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy: Caregivers from Hell
Munchausen’s by Proxy is an illness by which a person, usually the caregiver of the family, purposely inflicts pain and suffering on another person, usually being an innocent, helpless victim, and typically the caregivers own flesh and blood - their child.
The caregiver, usually the mother, becomes intensely addicted to the attention she will receive due to her child’s ‘illness.’ This is, ultimately, an extended form of child abuse and can last for years without any outsiders, even family members, realizing a thing.
The abuser will purposely inflict pain and illness on the victim. They will fabricate symptoms or physically cause harm to the child, convincing even medical providers that the child is indeed sick. The caregiver becomes addicted to the attention, compassion and acknowledgement that he or she will receive from friends, family, doctors and strangers because of his or her poor, ailing child.
The Munchausen’s Mother
Studies have shown that in 90 percent of Munchausen’s by Proxy cases, the abuser is the mother. Fathers have also been perpetrators of this despicable, abusive act, but there are only a handful of these instances.
One of the reasons it is believed that woman are often the abusers in Munchausen’s cases is that society values the maternal role, and women who have been given the title of caregiver are encouraged to seek assistance and sometimes even sympathy from others.
There have been cases of women suffocating their children, only to rush them to hospital to be resuscitated; women who put their own blood in their child’s urine to make it seem as if the child is suffering internal bleeding; women injecting their children with drugs to induce painful seizures; and woman who ultimately end up killing their own children for the sake of sympathy and attention.
Torturing an innocent to gain acknowledgement: this is their warped logic.
Munchausen Mother: Carol Lynn Schnuphase
Carol Lynn Schnuphase is a well known Munchausen’s mom, who faked her 12 year old son’s cancer, conning friends, family, charities and an entire community with his ‘suffering’. And all of this, not only for the money, but for the attention it garnered her.
Emotional, Physical and Psychological Terror
Schnuphase shaved her son’s head and his eyebrows to make him appear ailing and vulnerable. She then held a fund raiser to profit from her sordid deception. This deception was maintained for months and during these months her child suffered in silence, scared of his fate, his mortality and his own mother.
In addition to shaving her child’s head, she convinced him that he did indeed have leukemia. A 12 year old came face to face with his mortality and lived for months in perpetual fear of his own fate. To further the scam, and to further her sons own belief in his disease, she would spike his applesauce with opiates making him horrifically ill and terrified for his life. Physical and intense emotional and psychological abuse plagued this young boy for months.
‘Christopher now knows that he is dying…’ Schnuphase wrote on her facebook page garnering sympathy from as many people as she could. She wrote about her son’s bravery, his pain and his struggles. People began donating money to help save little Christopher’s fragile life. In the end Schnuphase had raised $7000 for her son’s care.
Eventually the police were tipped off about the scam and Christopher was immediately taken into foster care. Carol Lynn now faces two counts of accepting money under false pretenses and has also been charged with second degree child abuse. How will her son live the rest of his life… thinking at one point that he had no life left to live?
Cynthia Lyda AKA Munchausen’s Mom
Cynthia Lyda may be one of the most infamous Munchausen’s moms. Lyda’s two sons suffered at her tormenting hands. One abuse ended in death. Lyda’s sons suffered severe seizures and vomiting while in her care. One of her innocent sons died from a heart attack while at home in Lyda’s ‘care.’ Her second son suffered a severe heart attack but survived to live the rest of his life with brain damage.
Lyda admitted guilt once a hidden video at
Lyda suffered irreversible brain damage from an untreated seizure while in prison. Some may call this poetic justice - I know I would.
The Munchausen’s Children
The child of a Munchausen’s parent will live the rest of their life with deep psychological scars that will leave them with a mixed understanding of what love really is. Some children can go on to develop the syndrome themselves or will continue faking their own injuries and illness to gain sympathy, attention and their idea of ‘love’ from others. This to them is love, as taught to them by the one person who should have loved them the most: the parent.
To Protect the Children
William Goldsmith Brown said, ‘The sweetest sounds to mortals given are heard in mother, home and heaven’.
There are children out there who don’t live with this luxury. The luxury of a trustworthy, loving mother, a safe home to escape to… there are children out there, fighting for their lives every day and fighting off the murderous hands that gave birth to them, the murderous hands that rock the cradle.
I urge you, if you notice a child who is constantly ill, who is always hospitalized with no real illness or symptoms – speak out. You may save a child’s life. Munchausen’s by Proxy is not a well known mental illness but should be acknowledged and spoken about, because by doing so, you may very well save a child from a life of torture, suffering and stunted youth.
