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

Maybe I'm just daft, but I keep hearing people say "If one of these fat crazy munchies actually got into an anorexia recovery ward, it would hurt the recovery of the other people." Why is that?

Anorexics already lean kinda cluster-B, so I would imagine the counselors already are prepared for people to do shit like constantly try to prove they're the sickest, be mean bitches, and try to make every conversation about themselves and their issues. Not that every anorexic is like that- but I figure enough are that the programs account for it. So why would a munchie in the mix be harmful to the anorexics? Just because they're wasting space (lolfat) and time? I figure it's awful for the munchies because they get to be a full-on tourist and learn to LARP and copy the behaviors they see, and lap up the validation and attention. But why would that directly harm the anorexics? I think I'm missing part of the picture.
Severe anorexics don't just hate fat on themselves. They hate fat on other people, too. Being in the ward with a landwhale would trigger them into restricting more. It doesn't make sense but it's like an instinct. Eating disorders are irrational, so anorexics do things that don't make sense like patients with any other mental disorder.
 
Wait, hold up! Is that a real debate, or is that just retards on Tiktok being retarded?
Honestly, I have only seen jokes about it more than any serious discussion. Serious discussions I only skimmed through. It’s kinda both. People actually debating and tiktok being tiktok. I thought about doing research on it and making a post ngl
There was an article on Slate (I know, I know) a few years back about it.
How old were you when you found out that there’s a conspiracy theory about Helen Keller circulating on TikTok? For many olds, this terrible news hit them this week, when Twitter user @jamie2181 shared a TikTok video made by a middle school history teacher, who recorded himself talking to his students off camera. In it, you can hear a student saying: “Helen Keller is the Nazi guy. … She’s a terrorist. … Helen Keller was the blind and deaf person who was fake, she didn’t exist, but everyone believes she was deaf and blind.” The revelation that Kids Today “don’t know” enough about history is one that’s been had by generations of Americans, and part of the popularity of this teacher video is just about that—they’ve never heard of D-Day either! (Or so the students say—I’d never count out a troll.) But the Helen Keller angle is something new. “Not believing in Helen Keller’s story” is not a deficit of knowledge, but an active contestation of it.

The Daily Dot’s Audra Schroeder tracked the trend to May 2020, when a TikTok user first posted a video using the hashtag #HelenKellerWasntReal. The idea crossed over to Twitter in early January, with a tweet from screenwriter Daniel Kunka, who reported that his teenage relatives had argued to him over text that Helen Keller “was a fraud who didn’t exist.” If you visit the #HelenKeller hashtag on TikTok now, videos are split between Helen Keller jokes (a very popular one has Keller saying “hello” to a gardener by mistake and being busted for not really being blind) and others just advancing the conspiracy theory.

The comment sections underneath the conspiracy videos take predictable shape and showcase a cycle of madness: Somebody takes the video to task for ableism; somebody else says, “Go away, boomer, leave us alone”; somebody else says, “But for real. She didn’t do all that.” Sometimes users chime in describing fights with teachers on the matter, reporting being disciplined for holding fast to their beliefs that Helen Keller could not have written books, or flown a plane. “Suspicion stalks fame; incredulity stalks great fame,” Cynthia Ozick wrote in a 2003 New Yorker piece about Helen Keller’s lifetime of facing down critics. Ozick was wrong about one thing: She wrote, only 18 years ago, that such critiques were now unthinkable. “In an era of earnest disabilities legislation, who would think to charge [Keller] with faking her experience?”

As with many memes, the “Helen Keller Isn’t Real” theory has a heavy dose of irony, laid on to lend the videos’ makers some plausible deniability. That doesn’t absolve them of ableism. “The videos may have started as jokes, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are harming disabled people,” Haben Girma, a Deafblind human rights lawyer who wrote a Twitter thread on the TikTokers in January, said in an email to me. “Nearly every disabled person has been told, at one time or another, ‘You’re faking it.’ ”

Basically, it's a mix of Helen Keller jokes and people genuinely thinking she was fake.
 
Severe anorexics don't just hate fat on themselves. They hate fat on other people, too. Being in the ward with a landwhale would trigger them into restricting more. It doesn't make sense but it's like an instinct. Eating disorders are irrational, so anorexics do things that don't make sense like patients with any other mental disorder.

I thought a lot of ED programs do have bulimics and binge eaters mixed in with the anorexics already.
 
I thought a lot of ED programs do have bulimics and binge eaters mixed in with the anorexics already.
Yep, but I think there's a large psychological difference between someone overweight performing anorexia and someone overweight fighting their own ED. Of course anorexics' diseases will use literally anything as fuel but there is competition between anorexics that they don't have with sufferers of other EDs.

Its quite possible that many anorexics wouldn't be negatively impacted by having a fat munchie LARPer in IP, but they definitely are impacted by competition with other anorexics. So all it takes is one to be negatively impacted and the entire treatment cohort could potentially suffer. Of course you can't remove everything that might potentially negatively impact a single patient, but no one appreciates having people faking stuff they have worked really hard towards (be it through mental illness driving them or not) and having fakers that also embody your worse fear is obviously worse.

I was in a xanga community back in the day where someone got exposed for faking, they had previously been very severely underweight so were sharing old pictures. This was pre-smartphones, filters, widespread photo editing etc, so I trusted pictures of people's weight loss though can't discount others being fakers. A number of people massively spiraled and lost a lot of weight while reeling from the upset. Of a person they didn't even know irl.

In IP there was a very overweight bulimic, she didn't remotely bother me but if she'd have been anorexic I'd have definitely been negatively impact.
 
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Her accommodations for the blind are as thoughtful and high-quality as her accommodations for the deaf:

John Lee Clark (actual DeafBlind person) said:
In recent years, there has been a rush on the internet to supply image descriptions and to call out those who don’t. This may be an example of community accountability at work, but it’s striking to observe that those doing the most fierce calling out or correcting are sighted people. Such efforts are largely self-defeating. I cannot count the times I’ve stopped reading a video transcript because it started with a dense word picture. Even if a description is short and well done, I often wish there were no description at all. Get to the point, already! How ironic that striving after access can actually create a barrier. When I pointed this out during one of my seminars, a participant made us all laugh by doing a parody: “Mary is wearing a green, blue, and red striped shirt; every fourth stripe also has a purple dot the size of a pea in it, and there are forty-seven stripes—”

“You’re killing me,” I said. “I can’t take any more of that!”
 
Mobilphaggin’ doesn’t let me respond to pho Real but hey. Very much appreciate that input. Had my suspicions she only knows ASL at the level of an “educated hearing person” but having it confirmed? Priceless.

Anyways she’s quickly becoming one of my favorite munchies.

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I don’t know why she’s claiming nonspeaking now? I’m pretty certain there’s videos of her talking if we go back. I’ll have to put the phone down and do a deep dive at some point. That aside this is so fucking funny to me. Announcing your presence by… opening a water bottle? Just knock on the door frame or something like a normal person.

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She’s also claiming ARFID now so points to whoever said that was the next munch trend.
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Of course how’s she dealing with this sooper serious and intense phobia of new foods? By trying a bunch on camera! I think she’s doing this to copy @myarfidlife which is a young kid struggling documenting her exposure therapy.
She likes everything and doesn’t struggle at all with eating the cakes. There’s not even hesitation before she shoves them in her mouth. No fear, no sensory aversion. This part kinda makes me MATI just because ARFID is such a hard disorder to live with and isn’t super well known so to trivialize it like this? Fuck you. Top hat me but my god, fat fucks claiming eating disorders about not loving every flavor of cake drives me up a wall
 
Oh I remember this one. She was supposedly training service dogs for a while and iirc claimed to be Native and two spirit.

Now that she's saying she's mixed race androgynous nonbinary (fuck her retarded spelling) I'm going to guess she got asked too many times who her people are and she wisely dropped the indigenous part of her larp.
 
I'm a mobile user and can't be bothered to do a whole deep dive but I stumbled onto a tiktok user called @thechronic_explorer and I'm suspicious of a munchie. She never really states what's wrong with her (i scrolled for awhile looking) except for in the hashtags. She claims to be an ambulatory wheelchair user but her legs and gait are fine. Yet she claims she can barely walk.

One of her tiktoks is a slideshow of her and her mother, in which she claims her mother gave her two rare diseases; EDS (eyeroll) and a mitochondrial disease. This girl looks healthy as can be, toned, defined legs. Yet she uses multiple different types of wheelchairs, rollators and even a fancy one that takes most of the weight off her body so she can walk.

She fakes a bad gait in another video I saw where she's using the fancy rollator, trying to fake that her toes can't clear the ground. Yet in a video of her using a regular rollator at the beach, her toes clear the ground fine and her gait is normal.
 
I'm a mobile user and can't be bothered to do a whole deep dive but I stumbled onto a tiktok user called @thechronic_explorer and I'm suspicious of a munchie. She never really states what's wrong with her (i scrolled for awhile looking) except for in the hashtags. She claims to be an ambulatory wheelchair user but her legs and gait are fine. Yet she claims she can barely walk.

One of her tiktoks is a slideshow of her and her mother, in which she claims her mother gave her two rare diseases; EDS (eyeroll) and a mitochondrial disease. This girl looks healthy as can be, toned, defined legs. Yet she uses multiple different types of wheelchairs, rollators and even a fancy one that takes most of the weight off her body so she can walk.

She fakes a bad gait in another video I saw where she's using the fancy rollator, trying to fake that her toes can't clear the ground. Yet in a video of her using a regular rollator at the beach, her toes clear the ground fine and her gait is normal.
This reeks of self posting for attention.
 
I'm a mobile user and can't be bothered to do a whole deep dive but I stumbled onto a tiktok user called @thechronic_explorer and I'm suspicious of a munchie. She never really states what's wrong with her (i scrolled for awhile looking) except for in the hashtags. She claims to be an ambulatory wheelchair user but her legs and gait are fine. Yet she claims she can barely walk.

One of her tiktoks is a slideshow of her and her mother, in which she claims her mother gave her two rare diseases; EDS (eyeroll) and a mitochondrial disease. This girl looks healthy as can be, toned, defined legs. Yet she uses multiple different types of wheelchairs, rollators and even a fancy one that takes most of the weight off her body so she can walk.

She fakes a bad gait in another video I saw where she's using the fancy rollator, trying to fake that her toes can't clear the ground. Yet in a video of her using a regular rollator at the beach, her toes clear the ground fine and her gait is normal.
If you can't be bothered then neither can anyone else.
 
I've also never done anything like this so apologies if I fuck up formatting/archiving/etc. I dunno how to archive her tiktok but I do have some videos of what she posts for examples. She's a disabled travel type who I discovered through another person who was briefly mentioned (@amypolh) who did a couple videos with her. Not a self post, never knew she existed til today but I figured you guys would like her. She also has an Instagram by the same name and I tried to archive it but no luck, I'd do a deeper dive on her insta but I'm busy so itll have to wait for now.
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Here's the slideshow in which she blames her mother for her illnesses and also using the regular munchie tags. Another example is down below.

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Video where she explains her fancy rollator that takes the weight off her body.




Couple different videos showing her walking/gait.
 
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