My Mum Made Me Think I Was Sick: What Munchausen by Proxy Does to a Child | How To Feel F*cking Amazing

My Mum Made Me Think I Was Sick: What Munchausen by Proxy Actually Does to a Child — and Into Adult Life

The abuse that arrives wearing devotion. And what it leaves behind.

Most of us know what abuse is supposed to look like. Shouting. Neglect. Something visible and nameable. Munchausen by proxy doesn't look like any of that. It looks like a mother who never leaves her child's bedside. Who knows the names of every medication. Who cries in the car park and posts updates asking for prayers. It looks, from the outside, exactly like love. That's what makes it one of the most devastating and least understood forms of child abuse there is.

If you've landed here because something in your childhood is starting to make an uncomfortable kind of sense — or because you've been watching the Gypsy Rose Blanchard case and need to understand what actually happened — this post is for you. We're going to talk about what Munchausen by proxy really is, what it does to a child while it's happening, and what it quietly carries into adult life long after the hospital appointments are over.

So What Actually Is It?

Munchausen by proxy — now formally known as Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another, or FDIA — is a form of child abuse in which a caregiver, almost always the mother, fabricates, exaggerates, or deliberately induces illness in a child. Not because they want the child to suffer, at least not consciously. But because the role of devoted parent to a sick child gives them something they desperately need: attention, identity, sympathy, and a sense of purpose and control.

The child isn't sick. Or they are made to be. Sometimes the mother lies about symptoms. Sometimes she alters test results. Sometimes — in the most extreme cases — she poisons, suffocates, or infects. And then she sits at that bedside, visibly distraught, utterly devoted, confused and cooperative with doctors who have no reason yet to suspect her.

"The performance of care is the weapon. The love is real and the harm is real and somehow both of those things are true at the same time."

It was first named by British paediatrician Roy Meadow in 1977, though it had been happening long before anyone had a word for it. The mortality rate — children who die as a result — sits between 7.6% and 10%. That is not a small number for something most people think of as rare.

What It Looks Like From the Inside

If you are the child in this dynamic, you have no reference point. You don't know what healthy feels like, or what a normal level of medical involvement looks like. Your mother is your entire world, and your mother says you are sick. So you are sick.

What researchers have found is that children in these situations commonly describe feeling unloved and unsafe — even while being told constantly how loved and cared for they are. The gap between what was said and what was felt is enormous, but there are no words for it yet, because you're a child and the person telling you reality is also the person you rely on completely.

The Signs — What Professionals Look For

The child's symptoms worsen at home and improve almost immediately when separated from the parent. The parent's account of symptoms never quite matches what medical staff observe directly. The parent appears unusually calm, even energised, during hospitalisations — or seems oddly disappointed when test results come back normal. There is a pattern of visiting multiple doctors, multiple hospitals, always seeking another opinion. The child gets better. Then goes home. Then gets worse again.

Some children, as they get older, begin to sense that something is wrong. A few become directly aware of the deception. But alerting anyone — a teacher, a doctor, another family member — rarely works. Who is going to believe a child over a devoted, knowledgeable, tearful mother? Research shows that children who did try to speak up were largely unsuccessful. They learned, early and thoroughly, that their version of reality was not believed.

The Role Trap: Why the Child Defends the Mother

This is the part that people find hardest to understand from the outside. Why would a child protect the person hurting them? Why, in cases like Gypsy Rose Blanchard, does the daughter defend the mother for so many years?

Because the person causing the harm is also the only source of love, safety, and survival the child has ever known. Holding both of those things at once — she loves me and she is hurting me — is psychologically unbearable for a child. So the mind finds another way. It protects the attachment, even at enormous cost to itself.

If you think back to the Drama Triangle — the Victim, the Rescuer, the Persecutor — this is the most locked-in version of it there is. The mother plays all three roles simultaneously. The child is fixed in the Victim position with no exit, no script change, and no understanding yet that there even is a triangle.

"The child often doesn't know they have been abused. They know only that they have been loved — and that they are, apparently, very unwell."

What It Does to a Child's Identity

Here is where the damage goes deepest, and where it is least visible. When illness is the centre of a child's life from the beginning — the appointments, the diagnoses, the special treatment, the reason for everything — it becomes their identity. They are the sick child. That is who they are.

Normal childhood milestones — independence, exploration, testing limits, developing confidence — are framed instead as evidence of vulnerability. You can't go to that party, you're not strong enough. You can't do PE, your condition. Every normal developmental push towards autonomy is quietly shut down in the name of care.

Research describes this as children entering adolescence — typically a time of identity formation — having already had their identity formed for them. They are the patient. They are the dependent. And that identity doesn't just disappear when the abuse stops.

What Follows Them Into Adult Life

This is the part that almost nobody talks about — because once a child is removed from the situation, the assumption tends to be that the danger has passed. It hasn't. It has just changed shape.

Difficulty trusting their own body

When someone else has always defined your symptoms, interpreted your physical sensations, and told you what you are feeling and why, you lose the ability to read your own body accurately. Adult survivors often describe not knowing whether a headache is real, whether their tiredness is normal, whether something is actually wrong or whether they are overreacting. That self-doubt runs very deep. Some become hypervigilant about physical sensations. Others swing the other way entirely — avoiding medical care altogether because the whole experience of being a patient is too loaded to go near.

Identity built on illness

Even after leaving the situation, the identity of being unwell can persist. Some survivors continue to see themselves as fragile, limited, unable — not because they are, but because that is the story they were handed before they were old enough to question it. Some develop their own health anxieties. Some, in the most complex cases, go on to repeat elements of the pattern — not because they are damaged beyond repair, but because it is the only map of care they ever received.

Trust and relationships

When the person who was supposed to protect you was the source of the harm, trust becomes enormously complicated. Adult survivors frequently describe difficulty in relationships — oscillating between intense dependency and complete avoidance, struggling to read whether someone's care is genuine, and being particularly vulnerable to further manipulation because the pattern feels familiar, even comfortable. Some describe a sympathy for the fathers who stood by and did nothing — which tells you something about how completely the mother's version of reality dominated the picture.

PTSD, anxiety, and depression

These are among the most consistently documented long-term outcomes for survivors. The chronic fear, the constant low-level vigilance, the sense of worthlessness that was woven in alongside the excessive medical attention. Many survivors describe feeling unloved even while being the centre of their mother's entire world — because on some level they knew the love wasn't quite for them. It was for the role they played in it.

Gaps in independence and confidence

Because normal childhood development was shaped around illness and dependency, many survivors enter adulthood without the usual scaffolding of self-efficacy. Decision-making feels hard. Navigating the world independently feels unfamiliar. They were never given the chance to discover what they were capable of — because capability was, in this world, a threat to the dynamic.

The Mother Who Keeps Going

One of the most chilling findings in research on this topic is that some of these mothers do not stop when the child grows up. They simply adapt. Some continue fabricating their own medical dramas. Some find new proxies — partners, other children, ageing relatives. Some continue to harass their adult children with constructed crises, pulling them back into the dynamic through guilt, emergency, and need.

And the adult child, shaped by a lifetime of this particular kind of love, often finds it extraordinarily hard to leave. Because leaving means accepting something that the mind has spent years protecting itself from knowing.

If This Is Resonating

A lot of people come to understand what happened to them in childhood not through dramatic revelation but through a slow, uncomfortable accumulation of recognition. Something in a documentary. A phrase in an article. A therapy session that goes somewhere unexpected. A conversation with a sibling who, it turns out, felt the same thing but also never said it out loud.

If that is where you are, the most important thing to know is this: the difficulty you have trusting yourself, your body, your perceptions, other people — that difficulty makes complete sense. It was installed deliberately, even if not consciously. And it can, with support and time, be dismantled.

You are not fragile. You were told you were. Those are not the same thing.

"Recovery usually starts not with anger — though that comes — but with the strange, disorienting experience of being believed."

Frequently Asked Questions

Munchausen by proxy, now formally known as Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another (FDIA), is a form of child abuse in which a caregiver — most commonly the mother — fabricates, exaggerates, or deliberately induces illness in a child in order to gain attention, sympathy, and a sense of identity from medical professionals and those around them. The child is not sick. Or they are made to be.

The long-term effects include PTSD, anxiety, depression, difficulty trusting others, avoidance of medical care, and an identity built around illness. Survivors often struggle to trust their own perception of their body and their reality, and many carry deep insecurity and difficulty with independence well into adulthood.

Because the person causing the harm is also the primary source of love, safety, and survival. For a child, holding both of those truths at once is psychologically unbearable. It is easier and safer to trust the mother. Many survivors only begin to understand what happened years or even decades later, often triggered by something external — a documentary, a conversation, a therapy session.

A genuinely worried parent wants the child to get better. A parent with Munchausen by proxy needs the child to remain sick. Key signs include symptoms that worsen at home and improve when the child is separated from the parent, a parent who seems unusually calm or energised during hospitalisations, and medical results that consistently fail to match what the parent reports.

Yes — though recovery is rarely quick or linear. It usually involves trauma-informed therapy, rebuilding an identity that is not centred on illness or dependency, and slowly learning to trust your own experience of reality. Many survivors go on to live full, connected lives. Understanding what actually happened is often the hardest and most important first step.

I am not a qualified therapist, psychologist, or medical professional. This post is written for general information and awareness only, drawing on published research and survivor accounts. If you believe you may have experienced this form of abuse, please seek support from a qualified professional. If you are in the UK, the NSPCC helpline is 0808 800 5000. For mental health support, your GP is the best starting point for a referral.