Photo: Greene County Sheriff’s Office; Facebook
Both disorders are deemed “factitious disorders,” or conditions in which a person pretends to have a physical or mental illness in order to gain attention or sympathy. With MBP, a caregiver feigns an illness in her child and takes him to the doctor unnecessarily. This was the case for recently convicted Texas mom Kaylene Bowen-Wright, whosubjected her healthy 8-year-old sonto more than 300 unneeded doctor’s visits and procedures, as well as 13 major surgeries.
Bowen-Wright wasrecently sentenced to six yearsin prison. Her son survived.
What are some of the most common myths associated with MBP, and what is the reality behind this disturbing phenomenon?
“It’s incredibly isolating, which makes people think it’s incredibly rare,” Dunlop tells PEOPLE. “I believe it’s underreported. Most perpetrators are never convicted, and never end up with their kids taken away.”
Dr. Marc Feldman, author of the bookDying to Be Illand a leading expert on MBP, agrees. “Most cases are never recognized,” he says. “Instead, the child undergoes years of suffering without any doctor, relative, or friend ever realizing that the mother herself is the reason the child is so sick. It is not nearly as rare as many people think.”
There also aren’t many statistics about this kind of abuse because it’s not as deeply studied as other forms of child abuse, Dunlop notes.
Myth 2: People with MBP are ‘crazy.’
Women who abuse their children in this fashion often “seem very normal and credible, and are very smart,” Dunlop says.
Most of them have been manipulating doctors, relatives and friends for years. “A lot of times, the perpetrators are middle-class moms, some of them with medical backgrounds,” says Dunlop.
This means the women are often knowledgeable about what to do — andnotdo — to evade suspicion.
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“This terminology … opens the door for accused perpetrators to claim in court that they were merely the helpless victims of a mental illness,” Feldman says.
Myth 3: MBP is treatable.
However, Feldman has seen some positive outcomes. As he discusses inDying to Be Ill, one patient initially denied lying about her kids having constant seizures. Despite the initial denial, Feldman says she improved “remarkably” over the next few years with “psychotherapy, treatment for depression, parenting classes, and further education,” and eventually was reunited with her child.
Myth 4: MBP is about financial gain.
In most cases, the primary motivation for MBP moms is not money — it’s attention. “The main reasons the mothers behave this way is that they are after attention and concern,” says Feldman. “They seek to control their child … or they are angry, rageful people with sadistic tendencies. This last group is the most likely to actually kill the child,” he says.
source: people.com
