Community Munchausen's by Internet (Malingerers, Munchies, Spoonies, etc) - Feigning Illnesses for Attention

[yourdadscumdumpster]

I've been thinking a lot about Victoria lately, given the recent kuru-konfusion. She's strange, and not in the way all munchies are strange. There's no one else quite like her, and that says a lot in a subculture where even intellectually disabled women dying of treatment-resistant epilepsy have skinwalkers.

People who get colloquially tagged munchies are often people with a thick soup of physiological, psychogenic, malingered, and iatrogenic issues colliding. Victoria usually doesn't seem like those people, but nor does she seem like the people with classical Munchausen's syndrome (e.g. Paige). It's been said before that she "doesn't seem to understand what diseases are or what they do to you". Most munchies (of whatever stripe) are very interested in medicine, they research on their own time, they want to sound at least plausible enough to convince other laymen, they get jobs in healthcare ranging from 'CNA' to 'failed med student who ends up a CNA'. Victoria does not understand medicine, nor does she care to research it. It's not helped by the fact her past is such a cipher. We don't know who she was before she was Victoria Guyadeen, Crazy Munchie. Even the pics of her face pre-steroids are a rarity.

I wondered at first if it was just "munchie + dumb", if the issue was confounded by the people who put up better fronts than her just being academically smarter and more able to understand what they research. But Victoria's claims are weird in ways that aren't purely explainable by low intelligence. Your everyday Dunning-Kruger, knowledge-stops-at-middle-school-biology, low IQ brainlet would laugh at you for saying your identical twin gave you a third set of genes. Dumb people know people who have cancer go to cancer doctors and can Google words they don't know like "kuru" and "Morgellons". She also, by self-report, gets called out pretty explicitly by doctors compared to most people suspected of faking, like they find her so much more obvious than any other obvious munchie, and like they find it particularly urgent she gets a psych consult compared to anyone else with a mental disorder that, let's remind people, can result in you dying horribly and painfully at a young age with little advance warning.

It's like she has some kind of somatic delusion. The conjoined twin idea and the universe she's built around it isn't ordinary munchie stuff, and she doesn't present as somebody concerned with medical science outside her own head. It's bizarre in nature and it looks grafted on even from the vantage point of not knowing her premorbid personality. But, exactly because we don't know her premorbid personality, it's hard to tell.

Holy shit, her conjoined twin is her Sonichu. You’ve cracked it.

 

[Help Me Move This Table]

It's like she has some kind of somatic delusion. The conjoined twin idea and the universe she's built around it isn't ordinary munchie stuff, and she doesn't present as somebody concerned with medical science outside her own head. It's bizarre in nature and it looks grafted on even from the vantage point of not knowing her premorbid personality. But, exactly because we don't know her premorbid personality, it's hard to tell.

The only thing that makes sense to me is if she was adopted and really pained about not having blood relations. Is anything known about her family background?

 

[SashaBastion]

Her tiktoks are as boring as always and I'm an idiot mobile fag who doesn't know how to archive so here's a simple screenshot.

Spoiler: Slightly gross

View attachment 3257585

I finally caved in and installed tiktok just to witness the last days () of our sad walrus. Apparently she now has a mrsa infested ulcer on her thigh and the muscle tissue around it is dead. As of seven hours ago she still had both of her legs. Poor little Paige, not even getting a cool amputation out of her surgery.

Her tiktoks are as boring as always and I'm an idiot mobile fag who doesn't know how to archive so here's a simple screenshot.

Spoiler: Slightly gross

View attachment 3257585

Do you reckons Paige’s doctors know that she’s essentially on a long term suicide mission? And that she’s purposefully contaminating her wounds. If they DO know/suspect, why haven’t they sectioned her? Institutionalised her, put her on a on all inclusive 1:1 or 2:1, for 24/7 hours for around 3 or 4 weeks? Subsequently, if Paige’s wounds/ulcers/infections started to heal for the first time under such an invasion set-up, her life could potentially be saved, right?

 

[Cold Waffle]

Do you reckons Paige’s doctors know that she’s essentially on a long term suicide mission? And that she’s purposefully contaminating her wounds. If they DO know/suspect, why haven’t they sectioned her? Institutionalised her, put her on a on all inclusive 1:1 or 2:1, for 24/7 hours for around 3 or 4 weeks? Subsequently, if Paige’s wounds/ulcers/infections started to heal for the first time under such an invasion set-up, her life could potentially be saved, right?

Yes, Paige's doctors are aware that she is the source of her demise. If you search the thread for her, you'll see that they placed straight casts on her arms so she couldn't fuck with her healing processes. They're not going great lengths to save her from her misery because nothing will stick. For example, she doesn't have a surgical feeding tube because of infection risk. She's had a nose hose for years, but has never been a candidate for surgical options.

 

[Thomas Eugene Paris]

What I don’t get is why these geniuses claim such rare and/or incurable cancers instead of common (yet deadly) ones that would be much more believable?

See the Grey’s Anatomy writer who claimed she had chondrosarcoma and somehow became one of the few people to survive said cancer. (Note this is obviously because she never actually had it.)

Wow. Elisabeth Finch sounds absolutely insufferable. Thanks for that article.

 

[son of jurassic bark]

The article's hilarious because Grey's has inspired so many munchies. It'd be like if the Fault in Our Stars guy turned out to be one.

Grey's Anatomy ended up being such a black hole of autism, no offense to anyone who watched it without being a total sperg.

 

[Mustard on the cob]

I’ve been quietly reading this thread for months, and decided to join. I think I spotted a potential candidate on tiktok (found her insta as well), she’s from my native country (non english speaking) so I’m not sure if sharing her posts makes any sense and I won’t do it for now. The thing is; I’m not sure if she’s actually faking, but something about her attitude just reminds me of the typical munchie. She’s mainly 'claiming' MALS and Dunbar syndrome and that the MALS caused her to go into cardiac arrest (I only did a really quick look into MALS and couldn’t find anything about it causing that, but I also think that would be hard to fake…)
Anyways even if the diagnoses are real, something is odd to me. Her Instagram basically consists of her sharing how incredibly rare her disease is, how hard her life is (even if she’s not munching, something about this always puts me off idk), how shitty all doctors are (except the one who diagnosed her MALS), hospital selfies, inspirational Pinterest quotes and pictures of opioids…
Her very first post claims that she made this account in order to find people with the same diagnosis or to give hope to people dealing with MALS or something similar, but if I got diagnosed with it and would stumble upon her account the last thing I would feel is hope…
Apologies for the shitty post, but if anyone is interested I’m willing to share more

 

[Potato Cat]

I think Victoria isn't as successful as the other munchies because she's not only got a hideous personality but she's incredibly fat and unattractive. The more successful munchies are generally attractive,middle to upper class white women who aren't known for screeching like a banshee, like Victoria.

I find it baffling that Victoria obviously thinks she's attractive and smart, when in reality she's far from it.

 

[SaturnBeforeSunset]

Words fail me with this one, friends.

 

[Mary Tyler Meltdown]

I've been thinking a lot about Victoria lately, given the recent kuru-konfusion. She's strange, and not in the way all munchies are strange. There's no one else quite like her, and that says a lot in a subculture where even intellectually disabled women dying of treatment-resistant epilepsy have skinwalkers.

People who get colloquially tagged munchies are often people with a thick soup of physiological, psychogenic, malingered, and iatrogenic issues colliding. Victoria usually doesn't seem like those people, but nor does she seem like the people with classical Munchausen's syndrome (e.g. Paige). It's been said before that she "doesn't seem to understand what diseases are or what they do to you". Most munchies (of whatever stripe) are very interested in medicine, they research on their own time, they want to sound at least plausible enough to convince other laymen, they get jobs in healthcare ranging from 'CNA' to 'failed med student who ends up a CNA'. Victoria does not understand medicine, nor does she care to research it. It's not helped by the fact her past is such a cipher. We don't know who she was before she was Victoria Guyadeen, Crazy Munchie. Even the pics of her face pre-steroids are a rarity.

I wondered at first if it was just "munchie + dumb", if the issue was confounded by the people who put up better fronts than her just being academically smarter and more able to understand what they research. But Victoria's claims are weird in ways that aren't purely explainable by low intelligence. Your everyday Dunning-Kruger, knowledge-stops-at-middle-school-biology, low IQ brainlet would laugh at you for saying your identical twin gave you a third set of genes. Dumb people know people who have cancer go to cancer doctors and can Google words they don't know like "kuru" and "Morgellons". She also, by self-report, gets called out pretty explicitly by doctors compared to most people suspected of faking, like they find her so much more obvious than any other obvious munchie, and like they find it particularly urgent she gets a psych consult compared to anyone else with a mental disorder that, let's remind people, can result in you dying horribly and painfully at a young age with little advance warning.

It's like she has some kind of somatic delusion. The conjoined twin idea and the universe she's built around it isn't ordinary munchie stuff, and she doesn't present as somebody concerned with medical science outside her own head. It's bizarre in nature and it looks grafted on even from the vantage point of not knowing her premorbid personality. But, exactly because we don't know her premorbid personality, it's hard to tell.

Victoria is different in my opinion because while many munchies are obsessed with being sick and obtaining medical toys/dogs for Instagram, Victoria just strikes me as a pathological liar that just happened to lie about being ill. I think if she hadn't picked being sick as her Big Lie she'd be telling people she's the princess of Monaco or some other shit that's as equally ridiculous as her twin lie.


I think she's more about the lying aspect of her munchiness than the actual medical side of it if that makes sense. Obviously I don't really know but to me it makes sense since she doesnt seem to have any legitimate interest in the illness/medical sphere beyond being SuPeR cOmPleX.

 

[buoyverificationfuel]

The thing that sucks the most about these EDS munchies is that they are a very bad influence. I can imagine a young female with vague symptoms of pain, fatigue, brain fog and lets say nausea. This poor girl doesn’t know what’s wrong with her, so she googles a bit and finds this whole community and latches onto it instead of being treated properly for psych problems and somatisation which is the root of the problems in 99% cases, after the docs ruled out any serious physiological causes.

Thus why is posted Katie Stanina. She was that perfect mix of clinical low IQ, psychosomatic symptoms, and genuine but not yet dire illness to get sucked into this shit and it almost killed her. It might still kill her. She accidentally admit her MCAS was psychosomatic when she started reacting to things that didn't exist. Like she claimed to react to sudden weather changes and then reacted to the news of an approaching hurricane - except it never hit us.

EDS munchies' sphere of bad influence goes beyond just brewing new munchies. Let's assume the random young woman with vague symptoms of pain, fatigue, brain fog, nausea, etc does really have EDS, POTS, MCAS, gastroparesis, whatever else.
Most people whose main symptoms are just pain, fatigue, nausea, etc (instead of dislocations, passing out constantly, thermoregulatory and circulatory issues, inability to digest or shit, malnutrition, and/or any other assortment of serious things) have a mild case of EDS. They respond well to physical therapy, medication, lifestyle changes, and diet changes. They are not the group of patients who need surgical interventions or permanent wheelchairs.
Of course, social media says otherwise. If you're a teenager (or an idiot), you'd see the people who get narcotics for every headache, a feeding tube to avoid the tremendous struggle of eating, a port because ditto, surgeries for everything you could desire if you know how to "advocate" correctly, and you'd assume this is your future. If you already have that mental block of "I will never get better, this is my future" then obviously you will not get better.

Instagram and TikTok are genuinely some of the worst things to happen to the "chronic illness community."

 

[OK_Cogitator]

Nope. Not a girdlestone area, but every odd place (AKA my suspicion for self harm is high). Femur is one those bones that when its gets infected youre screwed.

Medfag note: you can convert a girdlestone into a hip replacement after some years.

"Why yes, doctor... all my wounds are within reach and none in those spots that are tricky to get to on their own. Its probably nothing, why ever would you ask?!"

 

[JackDonaghysSecretLover]

That video of Victoria reminds me of that episode of Always Sunny when Charlie finds Dee's video diaries.

My theory on Vicki is she's just utterly alone. I think we've all known people like her, not the lying about having an absorbed twin stuff, but the desperate to fit in so they'll say anything and it never works, they're just so.... painfully uncool. And to mitigate her lack of friends and likability she creates stories that are outrageously over the top in order to get any attention. You never see her with friends or even family. Tik Tok commenters are all she has. And now her lies are more and more outrageous in order to get more and more attention. Like MTM said above, not a munchie, just a liar.

Spoiler: Relevant story

I went to high school with a girl like this, her lies were ridiculous and became more and more over the top. Once at lunch she claimed she was on several hits of acid, despite obviously not being on acid. She claimed to be anorexic even though she was about five feet tall and weighed easily 160. Once she got her blood drawn and showed off her crook of her arm, implying she was using heroin, and her friend called her out on it because she was with her when they got the blood draw. Just a bizarre desire for attention via the heroin chic pro Ana
90s aesthetic, and failing miserably.

However she obviously got some attention because 25 years later I'm still thinking about it.

 

[January First]

Victoria is different in my opinion because while many munchies are obsessed with being sick and obtaining medical toys/dogs for Instagram, Victoria just strikes me as a pathological liar that just happened to lie about being ill. I think if she hadn't picked being sick as her Big Lie she'd be telling people she's the princess of Monaco or some other shit that's as equally ridiculous as her twin lie.


I think she's more about the lying aspect of her munchiness than the actual medical side of it if that makes sense. Obviously I don't really know but to me it makes sense since she doesnt seem to have any legitimate interest in the illness/medical sphere beyond being SuPeR cOmPleX.

She does give pathological liar vibes. There are two things that stand out to me about her: she's happy to take medications with serious and obvious side effects, but she isn't a "self-injure as part of the munch" type (which is a big distinguisher of the classical Munchausen's cases from the people with more multifocal types of weirdness, who don't have the guts to go full "pick at your skin until they have to amputate your legs").

She's on some kind of steroid, that much is obvious. She's fat, but she's nowhere near fat enough to have that face shape from weight gain alone, and old pics show it's not what her face naturally looks like. Prednisone is a nasty drug that people go out of their way to avoid taking. Even a lot of people in this thread avoided corticosteroids until the absolute end of the line.

It stands out to me that lupus seems to be her original claim. Lupus is a hard thing to fake compared to the classics. The obvious issue is it has a pretty conclusive test -- seronegative lupus exists, but is rare, and over the course of the illness will usually test positive at some point. There are reports of factitious lupus, but they do exactly the kind of hardcore munchie shit Victoria doesn't -- going between countries and claiming to doctors in one you were diagnosed in the other, putting safety pins in your bladder, cutting your tongue open to spit blood. If not for the prednisone face I'd assume she was just lying about the diagnosis, but she's got prednisone face, and I don't picture her knowing how to get prescription drugs under the table. Some of her munching, the less funny and thus less attention-grabbing kind than the conjoined twin shit, is also the traditional "claim your side effects are a separate illness" kind -- she does a lot of listing out things that are part of lupus and claiming they're entirely separate illnesses she was independently diagnosed with. One thing I wonder is if she's the type whose issues were triggered by a genuine health crisis, who then went completely off the deep end and started claiming things well beyond the original issue. It'd explain why someone with no idea how medicine works ended up down that rabbit hole.

 

[NoodleFucker3000]

Holy shit, that poor woman. The parents are vile. How the lawyer can talk about grieving parents when they let her literally stew in her own piss and shit for years is beyond me.

Are there any particularly good places to go down the CFS rabbit hole? I find the chronic lyme community bonkers and it seems like the CFS community are similarly insane. I can't imagine getting much stupider than people claiming chronic lyme in countries where there's no lyme disease but if I've learned anything about muchies and people with health anxiety it's that there's always something crazier out there if you look for it.

Stop the thyroid madness is one patient "advocacy" group that has some kooks that will sell illegal thyroid pills to people overseas.


Someone like Paige wouldn't get a hemicorporectomy because it is largely considered incompatible with life and they straight up will not do it unless they think the person will have a life afterwards. There's one guy on youtube who has a prosthesis called a "bucket" but his injury was received initially when he was young and healthy and fit before being gored in half by a fork lift and made his will deliberate.

 

[January First]

The only thing that makes sense to me is if she was adopted and really pained about not having blood relations. Is anything known about her family background?

Her siblings are adopted, but it's not clear about her. She does have a family resemblance to her dad:

Her father is from Trinidad and her mother seems to be generically white American. Her mother definitely believes her medical claims and has since the beginning. They're devoutly religious lower-middle-class suburbanites without much online presence outside her mother's religion blog.

 

[JackDonaghysSecretLover]

Her siblings are adopted, but it's not clear about her. She does have a family resemblance to her dad:View attachment 3263454
Her father is from Trinidad and her mother seems to be generically white American. Her mother definitely believes her medical claims and has since the beginning. They're devoutly religious lower-middle-class suburbanites without much online presence outside her mother's religion blog.

Crazy to see her here. A completely normal looking person.

 

[buoyverificationfuel]

My theory on Vicki is she's just utterly alone. I think we've all known people like her, not the lying about having an absorbed twin stuff, but the desperate to fit in so they'll say anything and it never works, they're just so.... painfully uncool. And to mitigate her lack of friends and likability she creates stories that are outrageously over the top in order to get any attention. You never see her with friends or even family. Tik Tok commenters are all she has. And now her lies are more and more outrageous in order to get more and more attention. Like MTM said above, not a munchie, just a liar.

The only person I've known like that did have some genuine sort of intellectual disability, I don't know for sure what it is but my guess is FAS. She was also a huge bitch if you tried to tell her anything she didn't want to hear, just like Vicky.
Is low intelligence some kind of early indicator for being an uncontrollable liar? Taking the time to think about it, most of the chronic liars I've encountered were either hopelessly stupid (normally or clinically), or somewhat above average but also extremely manipulative.

 

[valis]

What I don’t get is why these geniuses claim such rare and/or incurable cancers instead of common (yet deadly) ones that would be much more believable?

See the Grey’s Anatomy writer who claimed she had chondrosarcoma and somehow became one of the few people to survive said cancer. (Note this is obviously because she never actually had it.)

This was an incredible read.

 

[AirdropShitposts]

What I don’t get is why these geniuses claim such rare and/or incurable cancers instead of common (yet deadly) ones that would be much more believable?

See the Grey’s Anatomy writer who claimed she had chondrosarcoma and somehow became one of the few people to survive said cancer. (Note this is obviously because she never actually had it.)

As a Grey's Anatomy fan and munchie watcher all I can say is HOLY SHIT. This story is better than any thing on the show or in this thread.
Vanity Fair's expose is a two parter, here's the link to the 2nd

Scene Stealer: The True Lies of Elisabeth Finch, Part 2

When Elisabeth Finch met Jennifer Beyer in 2019, the two women forged a fiercely loyal friendship, and eventually got married. But as Beyer would soon realize, Finch’s past wasn’t what she claimed—and Beyer’s own difficult history was up for the taking.

www.vanityfair.com

Nice. Bigoted doctors harming their more informed patients yet again:

When they were face-to-face with the doctor at the hospital, Finch, to Beyer’s exasperation, wasn’t saying anything about her medical history. Beyer stepped in to say that Finch had cancer, and only one working kidney. The doctor said, “Let’s go into the doughnut of truth,” referring to the doughnut-shaped CT machine. When the results came back, he looked at Beyer and asked, pointedly, “Are you married?” Beyer said no, but that they planned to be soon. Looking squarely at Beyer, the doctor said, “Her kidneys look fine,” stressing the plural. After they were discharged, Finch dismissed his wording. “He probably just meant that my one working kidney looked fine,” she said. Finch later groused, “They don’t care about my pain.”