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

[Thomas Eugene Paris]

Funding basic research is one of the highest impact activities a national/international society can engage in. Virtually no one else is going to be able to fund multi-million dollar grants if the government wont.

FYI, I think you're thinking of translational or clinical research, not basic. In research, "basic" has a specific meaning. There's a good explanation here.

 

[Free the Pedos]

We’ve ended up with a and e blocked up with people who don’t even need urgent care, they should be dealt with by a GP, but if it’s a two week wait to see one, and your kid has an ear infection and is crying in pain, or you’ve slipped and suspect your wrist is broken, you’ll end up at a and e. Like it’s the third world. The nhs is a mess

Thanks for humoring me. I find the NHS very interesting. I don't recall ERs in the US being that bad as a kid, but the phenomenon you describe was definitely present. There was a need for treatment beyond what you can do at home, but not requiring a full hospital ER.
I know the NHS is beyond stressed, but it seems like more Urgent Cares would be a great place to start taking the pressure off the A&E and GPs. I guess when you have zero money to spend, even cheap improvements aren't possible.

 

[Otterly]

I know the NHS is beyond stressed, but it seems like more Urgent Cares would be a great place to start taking the pressure off the A&E and GPs. I guess when you have zero money to spend,

Yes it would be. And there are some, just not enough.

 

[glioblastoma multiforme]

I’ve been wondering: do you guys have an intermediate option between the ER/A&E and the GP in the UK? In the US we have urgent care, which is exactly that and helps divert people from the ER who have an urgent but not emergency problem.

In addition to what Otterly said above, we have a phone service called 111 for when you're not really sure what you should be doing. Depending on the complaint you have and the answers you give to their questions, they can get you a GP appointment super fast, or even send an ambulance.

In some hospitals we also have something called "Same day emergency care" for where its urgent but not A&E urgent. I'm not sure if you can just walk in though, I only know it exists cos my GP, who I saw within 4 hours of calling 111, sent me. Same day was a lie in my case cos I was stuck there 3 nights - though was receiving care within 10 mins of arriving, i wasn't waiting that long, just more unwell than any of us realised at the start.

We used to have walk-in centres, but all the ones I know of have closed.

Spoiler: Actual emergency "care"

If you call 999 now, they try their best to avoid sending an ambulance. I've only ever called once cos there was someone collapsed on the pavement, I couldn't wake her and she didn't look like they were breathing, even when I put my ear as close as I felt comfortable to my mouth it didn't seem like she was. The operators then got me to put my ear right to her mouth and she woke up, but I'd been explaining for at least a minute that I didn't think she was breathing before then, that her chest wasn't moving, I couldn't wake her, etc. She was out of her gourd and claimed to be fine so I left her to it, but I was really shocked. Like if she'd actually not being breathing, the time they spent arsing around would be more time her brain was starved of oxygen.

Don't bother with 999 unless you've just witnessed a major car accident or something, 111 is pretty good and can save the hassle of going to the doctor unless you actually need to.

edit: clarified something

 

[everybody in Portugal]

In some hospitals we also have something called "Same day emergency care" for where its urgent but not A&E urgent

Don't bother with 999 unless you've just witnessed a major car accident or something,

Sadly incredibly true. Basically, don't get sick or old or need any genuine help at all in the UK now, unless you have the resources to pay for private care.

In my area we have a separate 'falls' line for care workers to call so that clients don't end up waiting on their bathroom floor for 18h with a broken hip while they wait for an ambulance — it's falling that we are at a point where this is needed, but also a great use of devolved power/funding here. I've only had to call once, and was subsequently told it saved my client at least a five hour wait in pain.

Munchies though? They love the wait, secretly — the attenshun-malingerers, at least. When you're not actually sick and you know that, a long-ass wait is just another good excuse to ramp up the screeching and attention-seeking. Being help in an ambo outside A&E for three hours pre-triage is just another good excuse for a selfie session in a medical setting. Being made (rightly or not) to wait your turn for care when 'waiting your turn' means 18h in a packed waiting room is, for them, just another way to garner asspats and online outrage.

That they don't see they are contributing to the problem by being there so much and so unnecessarily makes me really MATI when I think about it but not as MAIRL as thinking about the long-term underfunding that is the main reason the system is on its knees, I'll take all the tophats now tvym

 

[Teghern]

Sadly incredibly true. Basically, don't get sick or old or need any genuine help at all in the UK now, unless you have the resources to pay for private care.

A&E is still fine if you've actually had a heart attack or got a bone sticking out of your leg or been stabbed or something it just gets a bit terrible the lower down the priority list you go because the 100% legit emergencies are always what is being focused on, spraying blood out your ass may well kill you in the next few days or be a sign of some really nasty shit (heh) brewing up your tract but right now it can wait, especially when the only staff available are two phlebotomists and a Congolese (Brazzaville) "doctor".
Problem with lack of mid-level provision is people either suck it up till it gets worse and they have an ambulance called on them (or as is the case for too many old people just fucking die at home) or they're whiny bitches who show up demanding pain meds because their tummy hurts.

111 is a nice idea but functionally pointless as it only leads to one result IMO , one of three theoretically possible; get an appointment at your GP (minimum two weeks most places), make your way to a hospital soonish, or don''t move we're sending an ambulance. Of course if you're ringing not!999 in the first place you probably know the magic words to get yourself seen by someone therefore invalidating the whole triaging aspect and you'll be irate enough that waiting ages isn't palatable so of course A&E it will be.
Oh but wait this is actually all on topic because you know who really loves all this because they slip right in the cracks? Fakers, just spit out the aforementioned magic words and maybe in a few years someone from the DWP might flag your file but yeah right that never happens.

Similar story with the cops being loaded with all the loose schizos nobody else can deal with, what is supposed to be a last resort indictive of failure is now relied upon as standard procedure, and people still manage to be surprised when it goes wrong. Oh but of course it would be better if we just corporatized it/threw money at it/Restructured everything into a new fresh ambitious IT system, fucking shambles.

 

[Less Nasty Old Person]

As a person with CPTSD ( heloo childhood abuse) um it might be just comorbid , you rarely get one diagnosis is often just multiple comorbid diagnosis in one giant gordian knot of hell ,and you develop extremly unhealthy ways of coping over time with one disorder, My dad had similar issue but he ended up abusive narcissist , i on the other hand developed anxiety and avoindance issues, i dont think you can properly treat your issues unless you accept A) shit is fucked B) what exactly is fucked they ofthen they couch it in not exactly your fault talk buut it will be your fault if you keep that way. Generaly they make it is like your choise but make sure you get the future is more fucked without therapy and meds choise.

You seem to have misunderstood the intent of this forum. Please take your #hashtag diagnoses back to tumblr or insta or tiktok or ehatever the kids are using these days for attention.

Alternately, show us your best Archie Battersbee impression.

And get off my lawn.

 

[Kufungisisa]

It’s very often used as a placating/ placeholder diagnosis’ because people will flounce if you slap a BPD label on them. CPTSD soothes them and keeps them engaged with therapy becasue unlike BPD its external things at fault in their mind.
You can treat BPD - DBT (dialectical behavioural therapy) has a good response rate. But it’s a very challenging process for the sufferer and they have to want to change. If the patient has no insight as so many borderlines don’t, it’ll fail.

Another brilliant example of this is; within the NHS the mental health teams that deal with the most troublesome borderlines are called "complex needs teams".

Telling them they are complex makes them feel extra special, contains them from spilling out to other areas of the NHS whilst convincing them to get DBT.

Examples:

https://www.centreformentalhealth.org.uk/helping-patients-complex-needs/

https://www.oxfordhealth.nhs.uk/complex-needs-service/

 

[vanilla_pepsi_head]

Another brilliant example of this is; within the NHS the mental health teams that deal with the most troublesome borderlines are called "complex needs teams".

Telling them they are complex makes them feel extra special, contains them from spilling out to other areas of the NHS whilst convincing them to get DBT.

Examples:

https://www.centreformentalhealth.org.uk/helping-patients-complex-needs/

https://www.oxfordhealth.nhs.uk/complex-needs-service/

That's really interesting. I tried a search or two with those keywords but couldn't find a solid or consistent definition of what exactly "complex needs" means other than, basically, people who waste a lot of health care resources. Just to clarify, what I inferred from what little I read is that it's not about trying to fuck around splitting hairs over which mental health diagnoses may or may not apply when it really doesn't matter, but about dealing with these people practically. No doubt that raging BPD and full-on Munchausen cases probably make up a good chunk of this patient population, but I think it sounds like it'd be very helpful for dealing with pretty much anyone who you suspect is overusing the medical system mostly due to social isolation, boredom, conversion/somatization, tendency to catastrophize, health anxiety, malingering, or otherwise having nothing going on in their life or failing to cope with it.

I think it's a great idea and wish something like that existed here. Teaching these people how to have a life outside of medical appointments is a much better approach than assigning a few dozen meaningless ever-changing DSM labels and chucking an indefinite number of psych drugs at them trying to find the mythical "right combination" and never seeing an iota of improvement.

 

[Thomas Eugene Paris]

I think it's a great idea and wish something like that existed here. Teaching these people how to have a life outside of medical appointments is a much better approach than assigning a few dozen meaningless ever-changing DSM labels and chucking an indefinite number of psych drugs at them trying to find the mythical "right combination" and never seeing an iota of improvement.

Some hospitals and insurance providers in the United States employ social workers for this kind of thing. They call it "case management", and however they are trying to spin it these days, it's pure greed a cost-saving effort.

 

[melty]

I started reading The Brothers Karamazov and loled at this part about "shriekers." Some things really never change.

Spoiler: Shriekers

 

[GainsGoblin]

In case anyone would like further sperging about cPTSD, I particularly like this review article.

Spoiler: TL;DR: Tism ain’t the only spectrum

cPTSD, PTSD, and BPD are likely distinct diagnoses but are often comorbid in different ways, and the authors of this article propose that they might represent “a continuum of post-traumatic syndromes that begins with childhood maltreatment or other traumatic victimization and then progresses with increasing morbidity from PTSD to cPTSD/DSO and ultimately to comorbid BPD/cPTSD.”

The continuum thing is an untested hypothesis, but I do think it potentially has some wheels. But for me the important takeaway here is that we don’t have a very well defined sense of what the relationship of these three things are yet, and it’s likely that the current wave of cPTSD diagnoses are akin to the early Asperger’s diagnoses…we’re calling it one thing now, but later we’ll probably clarify that it’s something else. Clinicians are certainly using it as a placeholder diagnosis in many cases and yeah, probably all the munchies featured here claiming cPTSD just have run of the mill personality disorders.

 

[glioblastoma multiforme]

111 is a nice idea but functionally pointless as it only leads to one result IMO , one of three theoretically possible; get an appointment at your GP (minimum two weeks most places)

If they think you need it, they will get you an appointment within hours, not weeks. Including if its outside of your GP office's hours when you call, on eat an out of ours GPs nearby. They can also get you a referral to the SDEC (thing I mentioned in my earlier post), which does get you seen the same day in a hospital.

Honestly its a great service and I think a lot of the people clogging up A&E should just have used that. I don't think I've just got lucky in a post code lottery as my opinion is informed over a span of decades during which I've lived in more places than I care to think about. Its not about knowing magic words to say, just answer their questions truthfully and you'll likely get an appropriate response, but it might just be speak to a pharmacist. That IMO is why its so useful, cos as a normal person you often just have no clue whether you should be worried about something or not and you don't wanna take up a GP appointment if you don't need one. They remove that stress by making the judgement for you.

If some munchie overstates whats up so they sent an urgent ambulance then waits for 18 hours, that's on them. From what we've seen in this thread though, calling a non-emergency number to get an ambulance doesn't fit the munchie modus operandi. They seem to either get themselves to A&E complete with overnight bags and teddy bear, or have had some super emergency that necessitated one of their helper humans calling 911.

 

[GibMoneyPls]

-Click on "Show unread" on Munchaunsen forum.

2 pages of r/chronicillness content.

 

[Fungible penis]

The mental hoops they have to jump through at the end are a nice reflection of the hell in which they lock themselves.

 

[Less Nasty Old Person]

In case anyone would like further sperging about cPTSD, I particularly like this review article.

"TL;DR: Tism ain’t the only spectrum"

cPTSD, PTSD, and BPD are likely distinct diagnoses but are often comorbid in different ways, and the authors of this article propose that they might represent “a continuum of post-traumatic syndromes that begins with childhood maltreatment or other traumatic victimization and then progresses with increasing morbidity from PTSD to cPTSD/DSO and ultimately to comorbid BPD/cPTSD.”

The continuum thing is an untested hypothesis, but I do think it potentially has some wheels. But for me the important takeaway here is that we don’t have a very well defined sense of what the relationship of these three things are yet, and it’s likely that the current wave of cPTSD diagnoses are akin to the early Asperger’s diagnoses…we’re calling it one thing now, but later we’ll probably clarify that it’s something else. Clinicians are certainly using it as a placeholder diagnosis in many cases and yeah, probably all the munchies featured here claiming cPTSD just have run of the mill personality disorders.

Why does everything have to be a goddamn spectrum these days? Those fucking rainbow people won't stop until they've ruined everything.

Hi, my name is Less Nasty. I have hemmorhoid spectrum, flat feet spectrum and post nasal drip spectrum disorders. My cats are on the cat spectrum, and I just found out my Toyota is also on the Hilux spectrum. I can only eat Skittles because I have Snack Spectrum Disorder.

It's almost as if turning everything into spectrums is the munchie end game so everyone gets to play smol and sick.

ObMunch: Annelise Dao, who seemed to have scaled back on munching, is back to sporting a feeding toob on insta.

 

[Zemblan Physics]

Imma say it: I actually have a lot of compassion for BPD patients. Their lives really suck hard. But BPD patients who are insightful and motivated usually get better with appropriate treatment such as GPM plans or DBT (but meds rarely help). I’m not usually a fan of destigmatization but IME doctors are scared of telling someone they have BPD because of the stigma attached, so it’s easier to go with the cPTSD. This is a wasted opportunity to sit with a patient and explain “you had a rough start, you weren’t taught boundaries and how to regulate your feelings, and you don’t understand how to make your life and relationships work out. You suffer and part of why you suffer is explained by how you react and behave in certain situations. Your own behavior reinforces your suffering. But there’s good news! We can work on that. It’s not going to be easy but if you stick with it, it’s gonna help you.”

That said, I seriously doubt most of our munching gals have BPD. They control the narrative too much for that. I’d wager they have NPD, masked EDs or in some rare cases, in particular the ME/Lyme crowd, some ‘tism. But the majority just fucking suck as humans.

 

[mindfuxed]

I think I might of accidently stumbled across a community of women who became widows thru munchausen by proxy.
If anyone's interested in , here's one example.
"Tiktok widow"

Alot of these widow accounts on tiktok are so OFF. Sorry if there was a better place for this comment

 

[Otterly]

Another brilliant example of this is; within the NHS the mental health teams that deal with the most troublesome borderlines are called "complex needs teams".

I think it's a great idea

I’ve just noticed it’s run out of the Tavistock. Hmmmmm

 

[Kate Farms Shill]

Part 3 of Jessica DiStefano. In parts 1 and 2 we learned all about her FIFTY! DIFFERENT! DIAGNOSES! and how she accumulated them by doctor shopping. She told us all about the many different doctors who told her it was anxiety, laziness, deconditioning, and lies, including one of the leading neurologists treating dysautonomia in the US. We got to read the delightful story of how she got rejected for SSDI over and over again as every expert she demands looks at her records and says she's full of shit. Along the way we found out that Jessica felt she was destined for stardom and that social media is her latest bid to achieve it and that she feels she is above having to hold a job like us plebs. In this part we'll learn more about her early childhood and how her parents created this malignant tumor on their lives by allowing their only child to opt out of absolutely anything she found even slightly uncomfortable for her entire life.

Spoiler: obsessed

We begin with the full story of her OCD. This is an excruciatingly long three-part series she wrote on her blog and because of her embedded images breaking the template she used, some of her text runs into the sidebar on these. She starts by just explaining the difference between normal intrusive thoughts and OCD, and the various types of obsessions and compulsions people with OCD can have. It’s not very interesting but she does go over most of the different types, not just the pop culture-y “I’m So OCD!!!” shit people talk about when they fake it. I cut a ton of it out.


And here’s her story. Of course she’s still trying to make PANDAS exist so she can claim she’d be diagnosed with it if she wasn’t as old as she is but whatever. She also tries to imply this fever made her hallucinate (“I stood at the stairs and tried to fly”). But kids are dumb and do dumb things, no fever hallucinations necessary. The doctors were not worried about this childhood fever and told them not to go to the hospital, it would pass, and so it did. When it ended she had a stutter which they also weren’t worried about. They said it would go away on its own and it did.


She had a traumatic event as a young person that terrified her (not molestation or sexual abuse, and she doesn’t want to say what happened) and after this started having OCD symptoms. After a bit more PANDAS truthering she talks about her symmetrical touching compulsion and her two main obsessions: her family will die if she doesn’t do her rituals properly or that she will vomit in public. She blames a poorly-conceived lesson in school for why she suffers from indecision as an adult. I wouldn’t necessarily chalk this up to OCD. Anxiety, sure, but I don’t know. Maybe if the underlying fear was if she made the wrong choice something bad would happen to her family, but it sounds like she was already just following the herd in this scenario and had no real doing so. I also have a hard time believing what she says about any of her teachers. There’s many more stories below.


Before school she had to perform a number of rituals to ward off bad things happening while she was there. It frustrated her and left her in tears when she had to keep doing it over and over because it kept being wrong. Sensory issues with clothing also happen in kids with OCD, either that they need the seams just right or they can’t stand the feeling of anything being tight and will try to stretch out all their clothes or their shoes need to be tied exactly the right way, something like that. All this sounds correct to me. Her mom took her to two psychiatrists who said there was nothing wrong. Then the children’s hospital correctly diagnosed her OCD after a five minute consult and put her on Prozac. So she was having textbook symptoms of OCD but two child psychiatrists missed it. Again, this sounds plausible to me if only because with OCD she might have been afraid to really say what she was doing and why because it might cause the thing she’s worried about to happen or make the ritual not work or something of that sort. Her parents might have just seen her extremely anxious and crying and screaming before school and been told it was separation anxiety she'd grow out of.


The Prozac made her gain weight rapidly and as a result she got bullied at school. Remember in her EDS post where she talked about her giant stretched stomach and her stretchmarks from childhood? Yeah it’s because she got real fat real fast. From this she started to develop Body Dysmorphic Disorder. In second grade she developed the handwriting obsession. Her teachers didn’t believe she had OCD and tried to stop her from obsessively erasing and rewriting her work, which made the obsession worse. No teacher ever went the extra mile for her. Again we get this thing where she has to point out she didn’t get special treatment. It’s funny because I mostly believe what she’s saying here about the OCD but also just find her so insanely entitled that it’s hard to feel any sympathy for her.


She tried cognitive behavioral therapy and had some success. Another thing that sounds correct to me: she did much better with it when she was older and could be more rational about her thoughts, because as a child she didn’t understand what was happening, just that she was scared shitless. In the midst of all of this, her parents pulled her out of private school so she has to go be the new, weird, fat kid at a public school. They had to do this because she was falling behind and needed special ed, which I’m sure didn’t help her not be bully bait.


Part two starts with a recap we’ll skip and goes into her middle school years. In sixth grade she was a tubbster. Her stomach issues started with a virus that created a new obsessive fear of vomiting. She has had a stomach ache every day since this started. The anxiety that she might vomit in front of people led her to avoid social situations. She’d stay up all night obsessing about her stomach pain and making it worse. Well that's just a little telling.


But it’s okay because that same year “Mmmbop” came out. She’s seen the brothers Hanson over 100 times since then. Strange that she couldn’t handle a sleepover because of her nausea but she went to summer camp. Maybe it was day camp, or maybe it was an early manifestation of her “I’m sick until there’s something fun to do.” The next year her stomach problems are worse and she spends all day worrying she may vomit in front of her peers. The way she got around this was mommy would sit in the school office while she went to school so that she would be able to go home if she was sick. She either told her mom to go home after a certain point or made her take her out of school early.


Normal teenage drama also wrecked her life and her stomach. Despite that this was clearly just another manifestation of her mental illness, her mom dragged her to tons of gastros trying to figure out why she was sick. She got diagnosed with gastritis and IBS.


Because she was absent from school so much for her OCD and stomach aches, she started falling behind in even SPED classes because the school couldn't force her classmates to bring her the notes she missed and she wasn't proactive in getting them herself because she didn't give a fuck. She played some rec league sports but couldn't run a mile. Something makes me doubt this story of being forced to run it over and over until it was under 12 minutes. If you can’t do it the first time, how are you going to be able to do it any faster a second time when you’re exhausted? Maybe she's just wording it poorly and it was making her run the mile every day until she got it under 12 minutes. To this day she still doesn’t know why her chest burned when she ran (because you were out of shape and rec league a few nights a week isn't cutting it for physical fitness.) She tried to get diagnosed with ADD and was told she just had OCD and her obsessions were keeping her from focusing. Many doctors over many years told her the same but her new genius neurologist knows better!


So much of this one actually isn’t about her OCD but just about mean girls, mean teachers, and various other people who she believes have wronged her. CPS started to investigate her absences, ambushing her at school and then at home trying to catch her faking and threatening to have her taken from her family. It turns out the person who called was just a cousin who was jealous that she got to stay home sleeping. She was later in a music video for the boy band Dream Street and became vice president of their fan club. She also went to theater camp. But she’s fat and boys don’t like her so her life is terrible. It really sounds to me like at this point her OCD was mostly under control by the Prozac and CBT despite what she says. She’s no longer talking about rituals, handwriting issues, or any compulsions and even the vomiting obsession seems to have mellowed a lot. She’s able to do social and fun things without being wrecked by her symptoms, she just doesn’t want to go to school because she’s fat, awkward, failing her classes, and the other kids are mean so she plays up her symptoms to stay home.


10th grade mom lawyered up and demanded the school start appointing someone to take notes for her when she’s absent and the teachers say that they’re not gonna do that because it's only enabling her. Based. She won and got her accommodations anyway. She still did poorly in her classes.


She actually failed her classes but it was just her undiagnosed ADHD and mean teachers once again, not the fact that she wasn’t going to school, isn’t very smart, and didn’t care. She was livid that one of her teachers gave her the grades she deserved rather than the ones mommy wanted her to have. She’s held back in classes and that makes her even more popular. Then 11th grade started and 9/11 happened. Her friend’s dad worked across the street from the WTC and was in a blind panic, but Jessica’s more concerned with explaining to her that she’s wrong about something inconsequential. Wonder why no one liked her. Jessica claims her dad was meant to work in the North Tower that day but something told him not to go straight there and the delay saved his life. Her dad’s linkedin says he was a sales director for GE’s plastics division at the time so maybe. Two weeks later she had her sweet 16 and was the best night and she has no symptoms, but the next day she was deeply depressed because it’s over and never going to happen again. Yeah she's just a spoiled entitled brat who realized young that her parents would do whatever she wanted and never question the discrepancies.


She starts taking acting lessons. She didn’t want to be famous, just make people laugh, honest! I was going to make a comment about how she has every opportunity to make people laugh now and isn’t bothering but she is. She posts “memes” and supposedly comedic tiktoks all the time. They’re just incredibly unoriginal and not even remotely funny. She allegedly learned to be funny from being bullied. So that was a whole lot of talk about things that have nothing to do with OCD and everything to do with her being fat, awkward, and not very smart. I feel used.


Finally part three starts with her developing trichotillomania. I’ve already said the reasons this sounds like a true description to me. I like this last paragraph where mom calls Jessica’s bluff. When she laid in bed malingering and saying she just couldn’t make it to school, her mom would start making retching sounds and acting like she was going to puke on the bed and Jessica would launch herself out of it.


She also threw glasses of water at her. LMAO, it’s a shame she went back to ulta-enabling because this is funny and might have actually helped her cope with life. Jess was now dealing with crippling depression and fatigue her teachers all brushed off but she now knows this is really when her ME/CFS started. The doctors she saw started telling her if she’s that bad they’d hospitalize her and because she’s dumb and doesn’t understand they meant a psych hospital, the fear of encountering vomit makes her go to school more often. Man, munchausen is a bad hobby for someone with a genuine fear of vomit. Not just the social media “tw emetophobia” type but like a real, diagnosable and diagnosed OCD obsession with the idea that she might vomit or encounter someone who is vomiting and that she has to do things to prevent this from happening. Her parents finally let her be homeschooled after she whined about it forever and she immediately got sucked into social media and the parasocial relationships to be had there. This would be when she started the Myspace and Ujournals that no longer exist.


She went back to school for her final year. Another outrageously bad interaction with a teacher: they’re doing self portraits in art class and her teacher says her nose is much wider than she’s drawn it and if she doesn’t go back and do a big old beak on her face she’ll fail the assignment. When she redoes it larger, the teacher comes back, erases what she’s done, and draws a cartoonishly large schnoz on her drawing that takes up her whole face. After this she became obsessed with her nose size and developed her Blue Steel look, which she thinks makes it look smaller than a real smile but only serves to draw so much more attention to it imo. Remember when these posts were about OCD instead of how much she hated school? I miss that.


Finally back on topic. She went off the Prozac and her OCD symptoms came back. She realized just how much better she was doing on the medication. She started a new one (I'm assuming Luvox, another SSRI that's frequently used for OCD) and her symptoms came under control again.


She went to community college and it took too long because she kept switching majors. She developed a new typing compulsion related to her old handwriting one where if she made a mistake, she had to erase the entire word. More unbelievably bad interactions with authority figures, this time a therapist who told her to get a nose job. You know if it was just one or two I'd believe that people said things that were either really shitty or which she distorted to be much shittier than they meant. But it's every single person, every interaction.


She dropped out of college just because she didn’t care anymore. We saw how well she did in school via her LJ: she blew off classes and studying for exams all the time to fuck around on the internet, play Sims 2, and go to concerts. With school no longer taking up her time, she was now free to stalk Hanson across the globe.


She failed at acting and modeling because she was model-fat and had no talent or dedication. No wait, it was imposter syndrome and her anxiety that kept her from taking tons of roles and made her stop auditioning. But we saw how her modeling audition went: they told her she was out of shape and needed to lose 10 lbs of fat and gain 7 lbs of muscle. She promised she could magically achieve that what is basically biologically impossible for a female in two weeks but never went back. By this point the OCD was well-managed with no more compulsive behavior. It sounds like, at most, she got called in to be an extra a few times and couldn't get time off of work to do it.


She started going to therapy again but since she no longer had any real problems it’s just sitting in a room talking about her week and she has nothing to report. She goes through a dozen therapists trying to find one that will tell her she’s special. They weren’t even trying to sort out her traumas and deep-rooted problems anymore! She tried to go back to school, this time for art, but she sucked at that too and had no desire to do better.


Then grandma’s accident happened. Grandma being in the hospital triggered her OCD again because this time her family actually was dying like she always feared.


Right after Grandma died she got strep throat a bunch of times and her boss accused her of spreading it to everyone. On the backdrop of becoming sedentary and being sick for weeks, then her POTS started. Which was also right after her OCD and health anxiety came back.


Once again, her coworkers were insanely over the top terrible to her but they were just jealous because she was so much better at this job. Even when she slid back into her old habit of laying in bed refusing to go to work because she was so so sick, her sales were still double theirs. LMAO I love this part – she called out sick but then went to a concert the next day and someone narced on her because she posted pics to social media.


We conclude with her saying her mental health is still terrible, her compulsions have gone down but she’s still obsessive (no shit) and the rest is just about how she’s anxious at night and her brain fog and ADHD and whatever. Cope cope.


My conclusion is I think she did have OCD as a kid but medication and CBT helped her way more than she will admit they did. She also admits she’s avoiding everything that caused the problems. If you go back to part one, the worst parts of her day were before or during school, when she had to do excessive rituals to stop some bad thing from happening. The entire rest of her story is about how interacting with her peers, teachers, bosses, coworkers, and basically everyone else was always terrible and everyone was awful to her. Now she doesn’t leave, she’s home all day laying in bed in her parents’ house, writing about herself and scratching the OCD itch with manufactured medical drama and the rituals it provides. She doesn’t have a boss or coworkers, she can fire any doctor or block any person who isn’t playing their role to her satisfaction. She obsessively thinks about her pain/dizziness/nausea or whatever and then performs less obvious compulsions to soothe the anxiety. I do think she has OCD, but it’s way way more controlled in adulthood and she’s changed the format. I also think she’s painfully entitled, sequestering herself in IRL and internet hugboxes where her narrative goes mostly unquestioned, unpleasant situations can be aborted or avoided entirely, and anyone who isn’t playing along gets banished. Here's a bunch of other pics she included in the insta version.

Spoiler: Jessica vs. her late 30s

So we just went over how Jessica is still obsessed with her high school days and early 20s, that she can't get over the "bullying" she endured from everyone at all times, and we've also seen in previous posts that she has a funny insecurity about her age. She's always complaining that she feels like she got left behind while all her friends moved on (because of her disabilities and the fact that she isn't getting free money, of course!!), and she also frequently claims she looks much younger than her actual age. She's mostly been using older social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram that skew more towards her age demographic and older. And with all that in mind, I'd like to bring us back to the start of her Tiktok where she will be thrust out of her c. 2003 comfort bubble and into the world of zoomer culture. Early in her account, she makes the mistake of challenging people to guess her age, expecting them to tell her she doesn't look a day over 20. Instead everyone guesses right around her real age or slightly older.


And oh, it hurt her ego bad enough that she had to respond because "some zoomer" said she looked 42. "I look 12!" No, you look your correct age range, even with this obvious filter, soft focus, and blown out contrast you have going on. Deal with it.

Mind you, right before this "challenge" she posted a close-up of her forehead wrinkles while she plucked a grey hair out of her part.


She is so fucking insecure about her age because she has done nothing at all with her life in those 36 years. She has had unlimited time to learn new skills and hone her comedic chops and she's instead spent her days scrolling whatever social media platform is currently relevant, listening to music from her teen years, waiting for things to happen. Even pretending for a moment that she is genuinely too ill to work, she could be trying to make her blog or her social media presence funny in her efforts to become a real comedienne like she says she wants to be. There's been tons of comedic memoirs out recently that she could read and learn from, learn how to write about these topics she thinks she's talking about while still being entertaining. But in order to do that she actually has to find some humor in the situation and she doesn't. All her jokes about her health come off as contrived because they are. She's not trying to make you laugh because it's so-sad-it's-funny; she's trying to make you feel bad for her with a thin, pathetic veneer of artificial humor. She can't possibly be funny about this topic and should quit trying to be, but she's also painfully self-absorbed and unable to talk about anything else. If it's not about her physical health, it's her her mental illness, her looks (and how she's totally fine with them!!) or someone who has wronged her. She has no relatable experiences from the last 20 years because she's been sequestered in her childhood bedroom.


Like look at this one. She does NOT think her age is funny at all. It horrifies her to think she's as old as she is and that people can tell which is why she keeps up with the lie that she looks so much younger than her age. She's trying to joke about it but she can't because her fragile ego can't take it. She just looks like some kind of grotesque crying Pierrot as she lipsyncs to something said by a woman 12 years her junior. I'm not laughing with her or at her. I just kind of feel vague disgust.

That's when she bothers even trying to be funny instead of going right for the guilt trip. She had every opportunity to make this story about how she was literally scared of her own shadow into a comedy act. She's walking to her car and she got the feeling she was being followed. Out of the corner of her eye she sees a dark figure. It seems to be moving in time with her. She panics. She freezes, keys in hand, too afraid to look at the apparition in her periphery. She thinks of what she can possibly do in this situation. Get in the car? No, she's seen that horror movie. She knows the second she tries to unlock the door her hands will shake, she'll drop the keys, and it will take the opportunity to grab her. Maybe she can do the thing where she puts the keys through her fingers and aims for the eyes? That involves letting it get close enough to stab. Maybe she can retreat into the house, scream "fire!", christ what was all that advice I read on social media?! She reaches for the car door but it also moves and she screams. And that's when she realizes it... was her shadow. She stands there clutching her keys in one hand and her chest with the other trying, hoping the neighbors didn't look out the window to see the crazy woman screaming at the fence and trying to act cool as she slides into the driver's seat to make a speedy departure. Maybe not laugh-out-loud funny but relatable funny. We've all had this experience, where your irrational brain jumps to the worst possible conclusion and makes you panic and run through your very irrational options, then you realize how dumb you are and that the "intruder" in your home is your own coat thrown over the back of a chair and then you laugh at your stupid brain doing stupid brain shit. But she can't laugh because this isn't funny. This is a tragic tale, the sad reality of what it's like to be a woman in America alone at night, and a chance to make people feel bad for her as the victim of society. Just for the record the town she lives in is basically suburbia defined. It's 95% white with a median household income that's more than double the state and national averages, with a very high average level of education and a very low crime rate. The only way she could be safer is literally not leaving the house ever.

Mostly she's just trying to ape zoomer behavior by posting unfunny captions to lip synced music clips or tired jokes that were beaten to death 10 years ago.


And trying to make people agree with her that she looks sick but not 36 at the same time.

Honey this is a joke you make when you're 19 and move into your first apartment or college dorm. At 36, even if you still do have cake for breakfast sometimes, it's no longer an act of silly rebellion against the rules the grown ups made you live under but a single mundane decision you made in a day full of mundane decisions. The sound clip she played is this line from Austin Powers.


Which she reused on insta for a joke about listening to the same bands since high school.


She also found this particular joke so funny that she filmed it twice. Same caption, same sound clip, filmed and posted almost two months apart on different platforms, wasn't funny either time. Also despite her protests to the contrary she is definitely using one of Tiktok's native filters. She looks much younger and 15lbs thinner in the first version (TT) than the second (insta).

On Insta we learn the true extent of her obsession with Hanson: she spent her late teens and 20s going to over 100 Hanson concerts, following them all over the country, to the Bahamas, Jamaica, and Mexico. I think my favorite part about this is you know some of that FMLA time she took was because she wanted to see another show and knew she couldn’t get off for it, or because she went and was too tired to get to work on time the next day. She just rubbed her few brain cells together and knew better than to post it publicly after the one time her coworker narced on her.


It's really not a "feat" to be alive when even if your health problems were real they're not fatal and your parents provide you a life of leisure and security.


this is what happens when you have nothing to do all day but think about different ways you are the victim of society. She graduated high school two decades ago and she’s still hung up on "trauma" from the mean girls and the teachers who blew out her excuses. I'm sure most of us have that experience of laying in bed and suddenly your brain is like "oh man remember that time you did or said something dumb and got a bad reaction in public?" but I doubt many of us would consider this "trauma" worth dwelling on.


No one is obligated to stop their lives to make sure you’re okay. Adults understand that your friends may drift out of your life because we’re all busy doing our own things now. There's also no action on her part here. She doesn't want to pick up the phone and text her old "friends" to ask how their day is or see if they want to meet for lunch somewhere like old times. She wants them to feel bad for not thinking to check on her regularly.


God I hope these girls never learn how funny it is when they say "fake it 'til you make it." In conclusion, Jessica is rapidly approaching 40 despite her best efforts to deny the passage of time. She has completely stagnated and no one wants to be friends with her because she's stuck in the past and self-absorbed and only cares about what she can get out of the relationship. She has used her limitless free time to do absolutely nothing to improve her life. And she'll never achieve her main goal of being loved for her comedy skills because she genuinely does not find humor in anything going on. This is supposed to make you feel bad for her and don't you ever forget it.

Spoiler: viral

She’s clapping back against the trolls. She’s not listening to them anymore. They don’t even follow her! I mean, I sure don’t.


She tries to do one of those swipe makeup reveals but since all she knows how to do is line her waterline and put on mascara it falls flat. The sole commenter tells her she looks better without.


She has a migraine aura while staring at her phone. She has daily and constant headaches but this was the worst migraine she’s had in a long time.


She totally subluxed something doing this, repeats the retarded lie that she can’t stand without locking her knees because she "never learned how" as if people don't learn things like proper lifting form or running technique well into adulthood. The big LMAO: the two girls who made the original video are advanced ballet students in Oslo for whom this hypermobility is an asset, who spend their days training flexibility and going to intense dance classes. This video went viral because the zebra set found it and didn’t see the humor in the fact that they were using two athletes who spend hours in the dance studio every day to validate their claims that they litchurally can't do anything without dislocating.


Speaking of viral, Jess is SO MAD that the algo never lets her videos go viral. As with her real life, her account is stagnant and going nowhere. This is unacceptable growth, Instagram! How is she going to become a famous influencer if you don’t boost her account?


A better look at her terrible allergic reactions and forehead wrinkles. She says the gold she reacted to was in pool chemicals, not gold jewelry. Over on the blog she says she was tested for MCAS but it came back inconclusive which doesn’t mean she doesn’t have it because the testing is rarely positive. Yes, that is how rare diseases work, lol. If you have a disease that has a global incidence of 1:20,000 and you test 20,000 random individuals for it then, in a perfectly rational world, one person will test positive and 19,999 will test negative because they don’t have it. Welcome to the 19,999 Jess, where you have basic bitch contact dermatitis and eczema. What saved her skin is almost all products from Neutrogena's hyaluronic acid based HydroBoost line, Cetaphil, and other very moisturizing products meant for sensitive skin which are all recommended for eczema.


And now Jess gets a taste of the fame she thinks she wants. “This is me relaxing! I’m so hyperextended! My hamstring is so tight right now!!!” this girl is so delightfully stupid, isn’t she? This video gets over 100k viewers and the comments are full of other hEDS truthers saying they totally sleep like this too, with more than a few of them commenting on how they used to be ballet dancers. Others just say this totally makes them think they might be hypermobile which i mean, statistically a lot of women are but it's not a disease.


She elaborates. Most people relax with their feet flexed up at a 90 degree angle! I relax with my feet pointed down by pulling my hamstring super tight! This one goes viral and racks up 1.7 million views very fast.

But this time a large percentage of the comments are people saying she’s an idiot and this is a normal range of motion.


“My feet are completely flat to the bed right now!” and your knees are completely bent. That’s normal. And again, benign or trained hypermobility is not the same as a connective tissue disorder. I truly believe she’s got some kind of compulsive stretching thing from her anxiety or OCD and I don’t even know if she realizes it.

“I’m not pointing my toe! This is natural! My ankle just looks tensed because it’s swollen!” girl.


I can’t believe these people are for real.


Here she claims she was diagnosed by a geneticist but we know she was diagnosed we benign joint hypermobility "a few points short of EDS". She also freely says that HSD is not EDS and that hypermobility does not mean you have a problem but IT TOTALLY DOES FOR HER.

OMG PEOPLE, yes, she exaggerated the “normal” position but she didn’t even come close to showing how far her feet can go when she’s totally relaxed. I also like how she goes on a rant about makeup and says “yes I’m older than I look.” No, you’re as old as you look.

FUCK YOU TIKTOK ZOOMERS YOU ARE NOT HYPERMOBILE AND FATIGUED LIKE ME I AM VERY SPECIAL!!!! Yeah Jess it's almost like this is totally normal and that's why no one believes you can't work. I love it, she's chimping at the people who disagree with her saying this proves she's hypermobile AND the people agreeing with her that this is for real hypermobility and indicative of disease. And this delusional tit thinks she has what it takes to be famous!

So because she went viral with that one video she tries to capture lightning in a bottle and it doesn’t work. She drops immediately back down to a few thousand views per video and within a week or two, no one cares. She's down to maybe breaking 500 views on a video. I think this is just proof that hospital drama is really what sells for these girls. No one cares about this 37 year old failure to launch sitting in her bed talking about how she sleeps a lot and trying to make stale memes new again. They want the drama, the surgery, the sepsis, the hospital room dances, and she’s not bringing that. Most of these are just “informative” videos with her repeating the same shit she’s posted on her blog and insta. Let’s not waste our time and brain cells.


She has a neck ouchy and asks Tiktok for advice, as one does. She reveals she’s already seen a neurosurgeon about it trying to get decompression surgery and they told her to fuck off.


Lol welcome to being a downstairs neighbor. She’s recording someone else’s kids running around upstairs.

Spoiler: Spoiled

The blog post this came from isn’t interesting except for the part where she mentions having an amazon wishlist a bunch of times hint hint people.


So I guess it’s time to laugh at her amazon wishlist which I found via a Linktree associated with her dog’s instagram account. That might be the whitest sentence I have ever written in my life. The oldest items are from April of last year and they include things like a dollhouse firepit (priority > high), wigs, makeup, tons of mood lights, audio equipment (in case hers breaks!!!), toys and craft supplies for young children, skincare products, coloring books, story books, and weird medical-adjacent things like a stethoscope and an occluder for ophthalmic tests. She's even begging for a new computer chair.


But if you didn’t notice her handle and bio on tiktok, she’s been doing some exceedingly cringe ASMR content 5 years too late for anyone to care about ASMR. This wishlist is for her Tiktok videos because you need to fund that or she can’t make content. She has plenty of other wishlists if that isn’t suiting your fancy!


Here's her xmas wishlist. According to notes from back in November when I started this it had headphones including sleep headphone helmets with built in blindfold, a dickey, new sheets, doc Martens, and a variety of bedding, pillows, blankets, and pajamas but either she deleted them or they were purchased for her this past christmas and removed.


Here’s her old wishlist, not to be confused with her new wishlist of course. Yanno when I first archived her internet presence, Amazon was not letting you see when things were added to people's wishlists. I guess they got a lot of complaints this past holiday season about people not being able to tell if something was a current wishlist or an old one people had forgotten about because dates are visible again. So that's helpful because it confirms what I suspected: this wishlist pre-dates her "illness". She started it in 2005 when she would have been 20. So peak "I'm an actress and this modeling thing is just for exposure" era Jess. She's asking for tons of Lucille Ball, Hanson, and movies/television shows that would have been popular when she was a kid. Even back, then, hung up on the past.


Sometimes we get a few trappings of adulthood, especially around the era where she was working in traveling and making an honest living: an SLR camera, some then-fashionable boots, etc.


Here we have the short-lived Active Jess era: fitness equipment and camping gear.


The international travel era.


I know there's people who collect physical media but christ.


Immediately after her "POTS diagnosis" and quitting her job we go into coloring books, the Sims, and, lmao, a wedding topper. How did trapping that man work out for you Jess?


I really can't believe how long I scrolled through this list and still it loaded more things she wanted. It actually crashed Brave Browser twice. Tis late 2018/early 2019 era is right around when she was revving up to create a public social media presence again and it shows. It's all beauty tools, hair products, new clothing, anti-aging shit, and accessories.


And flattering lighting, of course. I'm skipping a lot of it I promise. It's just... it's so much stuff.


Yanno, seeing how many actives and exfoliants she was planning to put on her face in this era really makes me question if she even has eczema or if she's just an idiot who was over-exfoliating and irritating it with retinoids. If you're not a skincare sperg, a lot of the ingredients in theses like glycolic acid and retinol work by speeding up the overturn of epithelial cells which in turn helps smooth the appearance of wrinkles. The problem is this can cause rashes, redness, and dry flaky skin especially if you jump in too fast or layer active products under an occlusive. Ideally you should test active products slowly for a few weeks and give your skin time to adjust to it which might mean dealing with some irritation and redness for a while, then add another slowly. I also notice none of what she's asking for has SPF. If you're going to use products like this you absolutely should be wearing sunscreen every day even if you're not spending an appreciable amount of time in the sun because it sensitizes your skin.


Wedged between all the "I'm not as old as my ID says i am" junk, she's asking for beach gear, luggage, and travel supplies. It's funny, you can actually see her planning a vacation someplace hot and sunny. We'll see this vacation coming up in the future. Still no sunscreen on the menu, i see.


Breast lift tape . Worried about our tiddies sagging in our swimsuit are we?


She's continued to add shit to this list until as recently as last week but it's just the same shit on a loop.


New wish list is a few items of boho home décor.


Mom and Dad appears to be stuff she wanted to buy for mom and dad.


Future Kindle Downloads. I’m sure it will surprise you that our girl is not exactly tackling Pynchon.


Future home, shit she would like you to buy her whenever her disability goes through or her manslave proposes and she can live on easy street. It's an extension of that Pinterest board we saw where she was fantasizing about her future kids' first day of school. She's updated it as recently as a few weeks ago.


More intellectual masterpieces (read: YA books and novels she’s watched the movie version of)


According to my notes there was even another one back when I started this, her birthday wishlist which was almost all skincare stuff. I’ve never seen one person want so much yet need so very very little.

Spoiler: gaslit

Back to the ‘gram, she goes out for a little beach date. Between making reels and trying to go viral, 15 page blog posts, her 1000 word essays on instagram, and regular date nights, I totally believe her when she says she can’t work any job at all.
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People ask adults what they do for a living for the same reason people in college classes ask each other what their major is. There's a 100% chance the other person has an answer even if that answer is "I'm a stay at home mom" or 'I am disabled.' She could just as easily say she still works in wholesale travel and no one would care as long as she could remember enough basic details about the job she used to have.


She shows you her good days but you don’t see all the days she can’t get out of bed at all and that’s why she can’t work. But she can still make reels, tap out long insta posts, do her makeup and hair. . .


Wouldn’t it be funny if she celebrated her POTSiversery haha like ironically like she’s defying it haha omg that would literally be so funny haha.


Consider that you’re not heat intolerant but discomfort intolerant after a lifetime of being allowed to opt out of anything you didn’t like.

“Like me please! Be my friend!”


this is normal skin elasticity in someone who has gained and lost weight and is aging.


This is abnormal skin elasticity from a CT disorder, spot the difference.


She downplays her symptoms all the time because of her past medical traumas and gaslighting. LOL what like the time you went to the Familial Dysautonomia clinic for your deconditioning and anxiety and he said you weren’t as sick as you claimed you were?

“It irks my OCD” shut up lmao.


YOU KNOW YOUR POTS IS BAD WHEN THE PULSE OX IS GLITCHING LMAO AM I RITE? If the pulse ox is glitching consider this is not an accurate reading. She’s mad that a doctor wanted to see her every three months to keep her on a beta blocker, which sounds pretty normal to me. Your doctors want to monitor you and see if the medication is working and not hurting you. She claims the pharmacist broke the law to give her emergency doses of it because “he knew I couldn’t live without it.” Sure kid.


She did a post a while back about her DSPS and I was actually ready to almost defend her again. It was mostly about how there’s people who naturally feel better maintaining night hours and struggle to adjust to daytime and how society views those people as lazy even though they sleep the same number of hours as you and work hard at night. This has been my experience in two decades of night shift life. But alas, on the blog she’s doing the opposite, admitting she actually sleeps 10-14 hours on average and spends the hours she’s awake laying in bed doing nothing. Thanks kid, appreciate the “advocacy” and “awareness.”



The only doctor she feels she can tell the truth about her symptoms to (read: exaggerate to her hearts’ content) is her compassionate neurologist Mommy foun- oh wrong Jessica. Here she talks about ~gaslighting herself~ aka those moments where she almost lets reality peek into the room. But then after years of laying around doing nothing and allowing herself to get more and more deconditioned she finally got a tilt table test and was diagnosed deconditioned, but fancy. She started to doubt herself when an actual expert on dysautonomia tells her she has conversion disorder. She still has PTSD from this terrible moment of being told he has dying children to attend to. Then she meets the good doctor who tells her she’s super sick and there’s nothing she can ever do to get better. After collecting a mighty list of diagnoses she finally felt like people might believe the lie, but sometimes icky reality still leaks in.


“OMG is this another hypermobile thing?!” No. That’s how human hands work.


“Who can play a song on their kneecaps?” PRETTY MUCH EVERYONE YOU FUCKING IDIOT. The patella is connected to the quadriceps muscles and by flexing the muscles you can make it move. Your quads are some of the strongest and largest muscles in your entire body. If you can’t do this, you have some kind of neuromuscular shit going on and probably have much bigger problems than not being able to rhythmically move your knee cap. The comments are full of zebras saying they had no idea this was an EDS thing.

Christ, she's insufferable and I need a break. Yet I love her so much. She's just so plainly entitled and spoiled rotten to the core but way too dumb and lacking in self-awareness to realize how she comes off to normal people. Needless to say Jessica is NOT cut out for social media fame, is completely unable to withstand even the most constructive of criticism, and will completely implode if she ever get the number of subscribers she thinks she wants.