Very interesting story in The Guardian, about women faking illnesses online in order to garner sympathy and attention from a potentially global audience, sometimes for years, "Some even go so far as to fake their own deaths, reading their own obituaries and observing the torrent of grief from the comfort of their living room." And it is not uncommon:
They have plenty of cases to study. There's the anorexic mother and daughter who kept an eating disorders support group updated from the hospital where they were both in intensive care, until the forum members noticed they both consistently misspelled the same words, and revealed them to be the work of a lone faker. There's the 40-year-old single mother who posted for months on an ovarian cancer website until her 17-year-old daughter came online to announce news of her death, and her own tragic diagnosis with ovarian cancer. When her daughter's boyfriend informed the group that she, too, had died, someone smelled a rat and rang the local health department. There was no record of either death.
Then there's 18-year-old Limeybean, one of the internet's most notorious fakes, who said she was an immigrant living in London with a rare, untreatable form of tuberculosis. Limeybean blogged about her struggle on LiveJournal and garnered a wide following of concerned readers. When her death was announced on a friend's MySpace page, the LiveJournal community went into mourning. But some began to have doubts. One of her followers – a medical student – compared her account of the illness with what his textbooks said about tuberculosis. It didn't add up. When the community felt they had conclusive proof of her fakery, Limeybean returned briefly from the dead to resurrect her blog, only to delete it again and vanish.
"We can only guess why people do this, because rarely do the perpetrators come forward," says Dr Marc Feldman, clinical professor of psychiatry and author of Playing Sick. "Many of these people are simply after attention and sympathy that they feel unable to get in another way. These are people who often lack social skills, and they can't come up with more straightforward ways to ask that their needs be met."
I wrote about MBI -- though it wasn't called that two years ago -- in No Exit Plan: The Lies and Follies of Laura Albert, aka, JT LeRoy. When I asked Laura, a 40-year-old woman, why she'd told her many supporters in the literary world that she was an HIV+ teenage male hooker, she said, they needed that person to reach out to, to believe he or she is helping, and that she, Laura, was somewhat prepared for the backlash when her real identity was discovered:
"The more someone puts you on a pedastal and fetishizes you, the more they’re there—love and hate kind of thing are very closely related—and the more they fetishize you the more they’re not seeing a being and they’re extrapolating out into some kind of image and the more they’re invested, they’re gonna have a need to hatchetit. It’s—just some kind of pathological mechanism that’s operating that has nothing to do with any real beings. You know, they’re finding a reason—JT was serving for them what it served for me, was a breathing apparatus, right? He was a breathing apparatus for me and he became a cultural breathing apparatus. We needed it. In the culture, there are very few people who survived. Look at—our little…our experience. Our experience is a microcosm of a larger societal experience."
I wrote about a more out of the spotlight case of Munchausen by Proxy, in Sacrificing Rebecca, which ended tragically when Laurie Recht murdered her teenage daughter and killed herself. Afterwards, people wrung their hands and cried and asked, how could this happen? But we know how it happens. The sunshine that allows for Laurie Recht, and Laura Albert, and anyMBI case, is the support and sympathy they get from us.
