Munchausen by Proxy, MBP, maltreatment 

The Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy Childhood 

A young girl waits in a cardiologist’s office for someone to unpeel the electrical contraption that’s been stuck to her chest for the last 24 hours. Just 12, she’s tall, skinny, and weak. It’s four o’clock, and she hasn’t been allowed to eat anything yet. Her mother, on the other hand, seems to be curiously excited. She’s about to suggest open heart surgery on her child to get to the bottom of this. She checks her teeth for lipstick, and, as the girl’s name is called, shoots her a warning glance and whispers, "Show them how sick you are . . .or else."

As a child, Julie Gregory was continually X-rayed, medicated, and operated on—in the vain pursuit of an illness that was all in her mother’s mind. Munchausen by proxy (MBP) is a psychiatric disorder in which a person (almost always the mother) invents or induces symptoms in their child in order to attract the interest and attention of medical professionals. Many MBP children die, but Julie Gregory not only survived, she escaped the powerful orbit of her mother’s madness and rebuilt her identity as a vibrant, healthy young woman.

Punctuated with Julie’s genuine medical records, SICKENED pulls us into the parallel universe created by her mother, a high-school dropout and former carnival cowgirl, who was able to construct a facsimile of reality so convincing that top physicians and Julie herself believed she was ill. It also pulls us into a bizarre family worthy of the fiction of Stephen King—a non-smoking, non-drinking, pastel-clad, gun-waving, child-abusing clan, with concrete lawn animals leading up to their isolated double-wide trailer. Fierce and funny, scathing and poetic, and ultimately deeply compassionate, SICKENED is both an inspiring story of survival and American gothic at its best.