A woman's 20 year struggle with Munchausen syndrome

Alan C. · November 21, 2013

Addicted to illness: How one woman recovered from a 20 year struggle with Munchausen syndrome

...the longer she stayed in the hospital, the more she didn’t want to leave.“I loved it in the hospital,” she said. “I just loved it.”Once she was released, Lindsay wanted so badly to find her way back to this new place she had enjoyed so much. So in spite of her good health, she started pretending to be sick with stomach pains, hoping this would allow her to return to that pleasant hospital setting.Lindsay credits this experience with sparking the beginning of her long struggle with factitious disorder – more commonly referred to as Munchausen syndrome. Craving that good feeling she had experienced while staying in the hospital, Lindsay eventually began researching and faking illnesses that she knew would keep her hospitalized for as long as possible.Over the course of her lifetime, Lindsay would go on to feign more than 12 physical and mental illnesses – including extreme disorders like schizophrenia, multiple sclerosis and even epilepsy.. . .“I wanted to stay; I enjoyed it,” Lindsay said. “So I started faking the symptoms of other peoples’ illnesses… I didn’t really know what I was faking. I was just mimicking other patients, like their illusions and hallucinations.”Lindsay became a student of all the patients around her, closely studying their movements and their behaviors. She would often spend one-on-one time with individuals in order to gain an accurate understanding of how their psychiatric illnesses manifested. Once, she spent an entire afternoon with a highly disturbed person with schizophrenia who talked using a word salad – a confusing mixture of random words and phrases. Lindsay would eventually mimic the behavior she learned from him to get diagnosed with schizophrenia herself.Over the next three years, Lindsay was in and out of the psychiatric hospital nine different times, mostly for depression but also for the other mental illnesses she had adopted. Having had a taste of what it felt like to feign psychiatric disorders, she decided it was time to ramp up her performances – and start faking physical symptoms. . . .Then over time, she did more research on the disorders she wanted to mimic and became much more sophisticated at faking the different signs and symptoms. She eventually became so adept at acting out these diseases, she would go on to be diagnosed with epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, Guillain-Barre syndrome, stroke, insulinoma, appendicitis and status epilepticus.. . .Over the next seven years, Lindsay would be admitted to 100 different hospitals.. . .Eventually, Lindsay learned that she had an undiagnosed form of bipolar disorder, and she underwent three years of intensive psychotherapy to help alleviate her manic-depressive symptoms. And in turn, the treatment helped erase her Munchausen urges.

Factitious Disorder is known to be comorbid with Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

Also see:

Münchausen syndrome by proxy

Malingering

Bipolar Disorder

Mania

Major Depressive Disorder