# Münchausen by internet.

Category: Health and Wellness

## Post 1 by PorkInCider (Wind assisted.) on Saturday, 26-Feb-2011 19:58:07

I want to share the following article as reading it makes me feel that both I and many other people on the zone other social networks and E-mail groups will have suffered because of somebody like this. It leaves you feeling as the article says quite upset and hurt by the way such people behave.
Please read and discuss.
Sick note: Faking illness online.

## Post 2 by Blue Velvet (I've got the platinum golden silver bronze poster award.) on Saturday, 26-Feb-2011 23:45:51

I've heard of people doing this in person but not on the internet. However, I guess it would actually be much easier to do online as people can lie about anything online when they are discussing things with people they'll never meet. It's a damn shame.

## Post 3 by sugarbaby (The voice of reason) on Sunday, 27-Feb-2011 5:26:26

I think the internet is the perfect platform for this kind of thing.
Ultimately you can appeal to whatever audience you want because all you have to do is create the persona to fit the person you want to be and somewhere there will be someone who will empathise and with whom that persona will click.
And the warmer, more accommodating the internet is, the easier it is to draw people in. Also people who have experienced similar trauma are more likely to empathise because they know what the person is going through and they know what comfort can be gained from a greater level of support. Which is why people get so badly hurt.
I am a member of mumsnet (which was mentioned in that article), and that poster who made up an obituary and blog for her dead child wasn't the first and most certainly won't be the last. But what made her situation worse was that there actually was a dead child, not her's but someone else's, and she took the obituary from the local press and turned it into her own story. And lots and lots of posters who had personally lost children became involved with her on a very personal level, exchanging phone numbers/emails/one even met up with her and they visited the grave of the dead child. And when she was outed (posters became suspicious and reported her to the mods) it turned out that she'd been on the site under several other personas as well, some of whom had had an equally tragic existance.
But there have been several others over the years, people who claimed to have lost babies, either prematurely or at birth/later into their existance; have had seriously ill children; who have been claiming to have been raped; have been in domestically abusive relationships and gaining help (and sometimes even money) to leave, and the list goes on. And of course the more of these people there are, the less likely people are to lend support to someone who is genuinely going through a tragic bereavement/serious illness/domestic violence etc because the question is always there as to whether they're really who they say they are.
But the closer someone gets to one of these trolls, the less likely people are to believe they're fakes, after all meeting someone makes them more plausible, and after all, who would invent the death of a child - it's inconceiveable to those of us who wouldn't even consider it.
Social network sites also give people more credibility, after all if you have a facebook page with 200 plus friends on it, few people are going to consider the possibility that all of those "friends" are actually people you know only from the internet and not in rl. Also some people give additional relationship status to their internet friends which again lends credibility. For example I have a (rl) friend on my facebook whose profile names four other people as his siblings. I know him personally and I know that he only has one sister, who incidentally is not one of the four named on this page. But his internet friends wouldn't know that, if he were a fraud (and I don't have reason to believe he is), he could easily befriend people and they would trust him more because he had given him access to his facebook and he has four sisters and that would be quite an elaborate construction - except it isn't.
Faking your own death has to be the ultimate really and the hardest to expose. Because no-one wants to be the one to accuse someone of having faked their own death.
Ultimately, we've all been taken in in some way or another, both on here and perhaps elsewhere. The extent to which we will have been deceived obviously depends on the extent to which we have become involved. But every single one of us without exception will have come into contact with a fake persona online.

## Post 4 by Miss M (move over school!) on Sunday, 27-Feb-2011 17:31:16

Never give away more than you're willing to lose. This goes for objects, space, time, emotions, and everything else.

## Post 5 by BethanyRose (the one and only Rose of Nativeness) on Thursday, 02-Feb-2012 14:58:00

It was interesting for me to read this, both because I'm a member of support groups for people with the various types of conditions I have and an aspiring mental health professional.
It is so upsetting when this kind of thing happens...it happened to me shortly after I got involved in the childhood cancer community. I was terribly upset, and I'm just a supporter...I can't imagine how much more difficult it was for parents of kids with cancer, especially those who had lost their children. It also happened in a group for people with mental health disorders. Many of us were upset, because this girl's fabricated tale was so much like stuff many of us had experienced with child abuse or other forms of domestic violence. We reached into our own painful experiences to help her with what turned out to be a lie.It's so hard to know what to do because we don't want to approach someone with suspicion or withhold desperately-needed support, but we don't want to get caught up in someone's scam again. The Internet and social networking sites in particular, are so helpful for people in these types of situations. They are wonderful sources of support, but just as with anything else, when unscrupulous folks enter in, all of that changes.

## Post 6 by OceanDream (An Ocean of Thoughts) on Thursday, 02-Feb-2012 18:24:22

Getting close to people online can be very dangerous. Sure, they can't hurt you physically, but they can do some serious emotional damage. i tend not to try to get too close to people I don't forsee meeting in the near future, to avoid, well, mainly this very thing.

## Post 7 by LeoGuardian (You mean there is something outside of this room with my computer in it?) on Thursday, 02-Feb-2012 18:37:22

Whatever you don't control, somebody else will and take advantage of. That goes for your emotions.
Honestly, had Claire not vouced for some of this I would have almost thought it a hoax. Sure, I think most young people have trolled some: we all certainly used to in the news groups to watch one or another group of zealots eat each other or tear voraciously at thin air.
But this business sounds predatory actually. I can't see anything good coming of it.