That child psychiatrist is still practising, I believe. But word got around. I know he tended to work in a range of different countries and as heavily involved in research. Doctors who tend to get a bad name with patients or with health authorities can also get involved in research as a way of keeping their career. it's a shame - it gives GOOD researchers a bad name.
A drama queen is not Munchhausen's unless they are deliberately faking it, over and over, to a pathological extent. A drama queen is an opportunist, someone who uses existing symptoms and expands on them. It is learned behaviour (as is it all) and like all learned behaviour, can respond to behaviour modification. She learned to exaggerate symptoms in childhood (very sad) but in adulthood has adapted her behaviour as a result of your responses.
I think we all have known people who were a bit over the top with their medical conditions. I have even been there myself, when I first left home and was a scared kid not knowing what to do. We had free health care and I visited the free clinic almost daily, must have driven the doctor crazy. At te back of my mind was always the thought, "Am I right to worry? Or should I just ignore tis? What if it turns out to be serious?" The trouble was, I didn't know. I had, interestingly, had a childhood where you were sent to school regardless. I was only kept home for measles, mumps and chickenpox. I saw the doctor for my shots and that was it. I had some injuries - they were either treated at home or I had to work it out for myself. I dislocated my kneecap at school and my mother never knew, because I put it back in myself.
Yet when I left home, I was scared and wanting to make sure I at least stayed well.
Unfortunately - while I was mostly wrong to worry, I was right a few times rather nastily. Food poisoning, appendicitis, glandular fever and then serious kidney disease from a congenital defect. It all hit in the first two years away from home. So maybe my frequent haunting of the doctor was an increasing awareness subconsciously that something was pending? I don't know.
There used to be a secretary where I worked who everyone complained about. If you asked, "How are you?" she told you in minute detail. She did have some problems, mostly I suspect related to a gluten intolerance problem. I became ill at about this time and found my co-workers incredibly unsympathetic. Although I tried to actually hide my illness, it was becoming apparent as I limped, and even though I would not say anything about my health, I was treated the same way as this secretary. Just the sight of me limping (I finally began to use a cane - that didn't help either) would have my co-workers yelling at me for complaining, even if I hadn't said a word. Then my boss had a go at me for not being honest about my health. I took a sick day and he accused me of being dishonest because I had said "fine," the day before when asked how I was. So I compromised with the boss - I would answer honestly when asked how I was, but keep it short. Two words. If he wanted more detail he could ask and I would tell him - in private. If I thought it was his business.
A classic example - one early morning as we gathered to assign tasks for the day, the boss asked me, "How are you today?"
I replied with, "Hanging in there."
Immediately one of my co-workers started up, "Don't you complain! You've got nothing to compare to me - I feel awful, I've had this terrible cold for two days, haven't slept a wink because I'm so stuffed up! You don't know what misery is!"
What I was dealing with was a lot more serious than a cold, but I said not a word, just let the woman rant. And this was coming from someone I had thought to be a friend, someone who was the loudest critic of the complaining secretary. I never felt I was friends with that person from that point on. Very sad. She had drawn the line in the sand and I just wasn't going to go there.
People's perceptions are highly variable. The secretary I mentioned was neither a hypochondriac or a Munchhausen's, in my opinion. She had genuine health problems but did not realise that other people did not want all the intimate details. In my early student days I was not a hypochondriac but I could have easily got the label. I was simply not fully aware of my body and its responses to a new environment. And sometimes the issues I reported turned out to be genuinely serious. I was unable to distinguish between a nervous stomach and the appendicitis when it hit. The symptoms felt the same. I was lucky that the GP at the clinic was so patient with me. It could so easily have tipped into me exaggerating symptoms in order to 'prove' I was ill.
I went back and read your post in detail again, Donna. Your aunt COULD be Munchhausen's, but only if she is actually inventing labels for herself that she knows at some level to be false. One danger sing I noted - she boasts about how much the doctors and medical staff love her. That is a huge red flag. A woman I knew when I was working as a counsellor, used to call me several times a day, every day. She would pump me for information about various medical conditions and then a few days later, she had always had those medical conditions. I tended to listen rather than talk, but I also took notes. One day she rang to ask me to help. She needed a letter written on her behalf to help her get back a government transport subsidy. Normally this woman would not give me any information about her past (another warning sign - your aunt clearly does let you in to information about her past) but because she needed my help, she reeled off a long list of diagnoses. I wrote them all down, put them in a letter for her (I had been believing her back then, this was the beginning of my suspicions) and sent it off. I had done it on te computer so I had a copy of what I sent.
About a fortnight later she rang me again and said, "I've just been diagnosed with diabetes! That explains so much of what I've been complaining about to the doctors! I feel so relieved to at last know what is wrong."
As she talked I checked my computer - diabetes had been on the list of conditions she claimed to have had for years. I reminded her of the letter she had virtually dictated to me; she got furious with me, screaming at me that I was a liar, she had never said anything of the sort.
The crunch came for me when I had rashly offered to give her to a lift to a seminar I was attending. Another friend (male - yes, it is relevant) came too. In the days before, this woman had been asking me how I was and, like a fool, I had told her. So the night we collected her, I saw all my symptoms on parade in this woman. But worse, much worse. She'd even acquired two quad sticks to walk with (which she mostly gestured with, did not lean on). The whole night, she openly flirted with my friend, as if she was trying to cut me out. She was all over him, asking him to help her into the car (she had to be lifted in and out, she claimed). She finally insisted he help her back to her room in the retirement hostel she lived in (she'd got early entry on the grounds of poor health). He told me afterwards she had made a grab at him to kiss him goodnight - all the rest of the way home in the car he was threatening to drag his tongue on the tarmac out the car window!
This woman had often told me (we shared the same specialist) how our doctor had said she was his favourite patient, he had given her a hug and told her so. it seemed to me to be the only love she could recognise. She would increasingly compete with me I realised, so I began to be unavailable when she called.
She ended up arguing her way into a nursing home placement, at which point the phone calls stopped completely. She was happy. All along she had done her utmost to hide her medical history from me, but had no inkling that because she had done the rounds of services in our area, I knew all about her history. I kept learning little snippets.
People with Munchhausen's will gladly accept surgical interventions even if they prove with hindsight to have been unnecessary. If a doctor can get his hands on their history and see a large number of exploratory laparotomies tat find nothing at all, it is a big red flag. But Munchhausen's patients often hide this info because they know this. I never got anywhere asking this woman about whether she'd had laparotomies, until I had a brainwave one day. i said to her, "You know - these abdominal pains you complain about could be adhesions. if you've had abdominal surgery in te past, even something as simple as an exploratory, it could be causing some of your problems now. How much abdominal surgery have you had?"
Suddenly she went from secretive to garrulous and I got an amazing flood of detail which amounted to literally dozens of pst surgeries. I wrote it all down then later on went over the list - the vast bulk of it (apart from one caesarean birth) were all the sort of thing doctors do in desperation to find out what is wrong.
She never told me about her children, or their upbringing, or anything. never talked about family. I heard about them from others - it seemed that someone had suspected Munchhausen's by proxy in her when she was raising her children, but was unable to effectively intervene.
And so it can go, through the generations.
Marg
