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

A new trend in MBIs has been gastro complaints.

FGIDs (functional gastrointestinal disorders), such as gastroparesis and the even more dubious CIPO, are insanely easy to fake, are virtually always idiopathic (of no known cause) with the exception of a clearly defined class (T1 diabetics), often goes together with POTS and is a nice stepping stone to mitochondrial disorder, which at least according to those affected can have just about any symptom in the universe, from cluster headaches to hypothermia. It is easy to induce with over the counter drugs (just about any anticholinergic will induce the same effects on a radioactive transit study), and as a functional disorder, no structural abnormalities need to be present for diagnosis (which are rather hard to fake). It gets them a nasogastric tube, and over time, many have parlayed this into a J-tube and even TPN (intravenous nutrition), which is phenomenally stupid as you can die from making the smallest of mistakes with TPN. But you know, they love how pathetic they look with their Hickman hanging out of their chest and the knowledge that they are the ultimate victims. Argh. Damn hard not to be a-loggy about these fucks.
 
Archiving this shit, because Nicole is always going for the easy asspats, and this time it backfired in the most wondrous way:

http://archive.is/mIVu5
(Original link https://www.instagram.com/p/BTjzewADtoU/)

In summary, Nicole is "donating" several of her unused NG tubes for charity, which essentially takes functioning NG tubes and anchors them into teddy bears for little kids who have to have a tube. (This is unfortunately rendered less meaningful when Nicole disclaims she also had a "tubie-friend"! ) One commenter's berserk button is mashed over the fact Nicole's malingering shenanigans are now essentially forking over gov't insurance issued equipment.

I love that she wears the beauty queen sash along with it. Wtf is going on in this girl's head??? The slightly crazed look in her eye is unnerving.

FGIDs (functional gastrointestinal disorders), such as gastroparesis and the even more dubious CIPO, are insanely easy to fake, are virtually always idiopathic (of no known cause) with the exception of a clearly defined class (T1 diabetics), often goes together with POTS and is a nice stepping stone to mitochondrial disorder, which at least according to those affected can have just about any symptom in the universe, from cluster headaches to hypothermia. It is easy to induce with over the counter drugs (just about any anticholinergic will induce the same effects on a radioactive transit study), and as a functional disorder, no structural abnormalities need to be present for diagnosis (which are rather hard to fake). It gets them a nasogastric tube, and over time, many have parlayed this into a J-tube and even TPN (intravenous nutrition), which is phenomenally stupid as you can die from making the smallest of mistakes with TPN. But you know, they love how pathetic they look with their Hickman hanging out of their chest and the knowledge that they are the ultimate victims. Argh. Damn hard not to be a-loggy about these fucks.

The gastropareisis "spoonies", especially on insta, always give me a little giggle. They are evenly divided between girls with overt eating disorders (sometimes concurrently listed as a diagnosis on their descriptions), and the much more depressing subtype of truly ill people whose pipes have shut down, and GP is the least of their worries. And it's not hard to differentiate the two types. Generally the latter never have that ridiculous lower lip pooched out selfies about delayed emptying.
 
God only knows. There's precious little photographic evidence of him. These are apparently his forearms. She also has a rather porky plateful in front of her of rather heavy food, for someone with stomach problems.

I've my own stomach problems, nothing on the level of GP and with good and bad days, but still my esophagus slammed shut and my stomach went on strike just from looking at that meal.
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Okay, baked beans. A convenience food that's the favourite of completely broke people with a week or two to go until they get paid, or else some miserable sod with a horrible chest infection who can barely drag themselves out of bed. High in salt and depending on the sauce, sugar as well. But they have a decent amount of fibre, proteins, carbs etc, and even if your stomach is giving you shit it usually stays down if you eat moderately, maybe with a couple slices of dry toast to help pad the richness out. All in all, as a short term food option it's quite acceptable.

Eggs can be a little aggravating on an empty stomach, but again, toast on the side helps even things out. Boiled is best, scrambled is okay so long as you keep it plain and light on seasonings. If you're the type who adds a little bit of ham, a very small amount of cheese, and a quarter of a tomato, all carefully seasoned with a mild mustard and black pepper, chances are good that you'll end up praying to the porcelain god in very short order. But fried eggs? Eggs cooked in grease or butter? And not just one, but two or even three of them at once? On a bad day I'd not even be able to eat half of one of those eggs, let alone more than one.

Mushrooms. I'm not a fan personally, but I've had some people tell that mushrooms are light on the stomach, and others tell me it's hell. All I know is that I'm looking at a lot of protein that again, is slathered in grease and oil.

Sausage? Not if it's a cheap one and again, cooked in oil. And even if you've deliberately tracked down a type with low fat, high quality meat content with no gluten or salt, and grilled without oil, sausages are very dense and there is always filler in them. My parents are weirdly convinced that sausages are good for an unhappy stomach, but my personal experience is that you really need to limit your consumption to a few bites to appease the one who is feeding you when you're miserable.

Fried tomato isn't a good idea. You have to eat them raw or not at all. Baking might be acceptable for some people.

Bacon? Fried bacon? An incredibly dense food, high in salt, insanely fatty? Are you fucking kidding me?

Finally, hash browns. Fucking hash browns. Two of them. Oversized. Insanely rich. Effectively fat held together by potato acting as a sponge. Jesus fucking Christ.

My touchy stomach is absolutely no match for people with severe digestion problems. But fucking hell... even when my brain malfunctions and I find myself on a day long food binge that I will spend the full week afterwards paying dearly for, I couldn't eat all of that. Not even half of it. Or even a quarter.

This bitch is full of shit and vomit.
 
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wtf! I can't believe people actually want feeding tubes, ports, etc. I have EDS, and no one who really has EDS wants this crap.

Anyway, I ended up here after finding some sketchy drama queens when looking up EDS stuff (I do participate on one fairly normal medical board, but I normally ignore these type of people or try to get them to tone it down if they are talking about their kid). These thirsty attention whores make life harder for everyone who actually deals with health issues. At least I can lurk and vent here when it pisses me off, or I'm in a generally crappy mood.

So, I'm pretty sure this girl Jaquie (https://www.instagram.com/Chronically_Jaquie/) is milking it. She has a cute dog that she is training as a service dog (this seems to be totally on her own...plus it has it's own Instagram....which seems like a red flag) and has received a ton of attention for it(even went on TV, etc.). She seems to have gone from fairly healthy to having a port, infusions, Vog mask, and tons of other things in one year. There are pictures of her eating big heavy meals in the ER after supposedly having an anaphylactic reaction, numerous disney trips, and every fifth picture is her smiling at the ER/hospital/doctor's office. She has long well groomed hair, shaved legs, coordinated outfits (that show off her port!), and preparing raw food for her dog (none of these make sense with how "sick" she is).

I'm calling BS.
 
I'm not exactly the paragon of health, being a drinker and all, but I'm thankful of the fact that I'm more than healthy enough to function and live a normal daily life and I am both repulsed and confused as to why anyone would willingly fake a horrific chronic illness or actively want to be hospitalized or have some painful disability just for attention and pity points.

What the fuck happened? Aren't we supposed to be glad to have our health? The only time it should even be semi-acceptable to fake being sick is if you're an elementary school kid and you're trying to get out of class for the day. And even then it's annoying.
 
As someone who works in the biomedical field and also happens to live with a progressive, incurable disease that will probably kill him within a few years but still doesn't have a 'spoonie tumblr'...

I'm incredibly repulsed by these assholes for one simple reason: they endanger the actually severely ill. I have colleagues who immediately start typing up a psych referral as soon as someone rattles down a litany of diseases and has non-specific symptoms.

It's odd how the currently trendy ones are fibromyalgia, POTS and EDS. Fibro is almost entirely subjective. POTS is extremely easy to fake (not gonna give tips here but it's out there on teh intarwebz) and EDS, well, the diagnostic criteria are set so low, it's almost impossible not to satisfy it. Even I would qualify for an EDS diagnosis. With obese women in particular, lower body ligaments are under extreme strain and female hormones do contribute to somewhat more laxity. What is diagnosed as EDS in them is half the time ligaments being stretched to their limits by a 450lbs body.
I understand how frustrating that can be honestly. Being sick is shitty and there is nothing wrong with venting to people about how it can take a huge toll mentally but it's a whole other thing for people like these who use this for pity, money when they arent even sick!! Legit sick people want to be better, they dont WANT to be in pain all the time, ill and on tons of meds just to survive. Why on earth they would chose this is beyond me, like I mentioned before the one thing they DO have is a mental illness but they wont ever admit that, ironically its the only true thing they have. These people wind up killing themselves by taking meds they dont need for diseases they dont have.
 
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Part of me wants to blame local newscasts for all these people faking illnesses for $$$ and attention. Out here, they'll put almost any sick kid on tv for a segment on the 5pm news.
 
wtf! I can't believe people actually want feeding tubes, ports, etc. I have EDS, and no one who really has EDS wants this crap.

Anyway, I ended up here after finding some sketchy drama queens when looking up EDS stuff (I do participate on one fairly normal medical board, but I normally ignore these type of people or try to get them to tone it down if they are talking about their kid). These thirsty attention whores make life harder for everyone who actually deals with health issues. At least I can lurk and vent here when it pisses me off, or I'm in a generally crappy mood.

So, I'm pretty sure this girl Jaquie (https://www.instagram.com/Chronically_Jaquie/) is jerking off it. She has a cute dog that she is training as a service dog (this seems to be totally on her own...plus it has it's own Instagram....which seems like a red flag) and has received a ton of attention for it(even went on TV, etc.). She seems to have gone from fairly healthy to having a port, infusions, Vog mask, and tons of other things in one year. There are pictures of her eating big heavy meals in the ER after supposedly having an anaphylactic reaction, numerous disney trips, and every fifth picture is her smiling at the ER/hospital/doctor's office. She has long well groomed hair, shaved legs, coordinated outfits (that show off her port!), and preparing raw food for her dog (none of these make sense with how "sick" she is).

I'm calling BS.
God, her face looks so weird. It's like a collage of other people's facial features haphazardly stuck together.

Also that dog is precious and shouldn't be with someone who's such an obvious malingerer.

Edit: Grammar
 
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Archiving this shit, because Nicole is always going for the easy asspats, and this time it backfired in the most wondrous way:

http://archive.is/mIVu5
(Original link https://www.instagram.com/p/BTjzewADtoU/)

In summary, Nicole is "donating" several of her unused NG tubes for charity, which essentially takes functioning NG tubes and anchors them into teddy bears for little kids who have to have a tube. (This is unfortunately rendered less meaningful when Nicole disclaims she also had a "tubie-friend"! ) One commenter's berserk button is mashed over the fact Nicole's malingering shenanigans are now essentially forking over gov't insurance issued equipment.

I love that she wears the beauty queen sash along with it. Wtf is going on in this girl's head??? The slightly crazed look in her eye is unnerving.



The gastropareisis "spoonies", especially on insta, always give me a little giggle. They are evenly divided between girls with overt eating disorders (sometimes concurrently listed as a diagnosis on their descriptions), and the much more depressing subtype of truly ill people whose pipes have shut down, and GP is the least of their worries. And it's not hard to differentiate the two types. Generally the latter never have that ridiculous lower lip pooched out selfies about delayed emptying.
I thought this was the Nicole from Intervention at first, who was another person who had a feeding tube installed for a medical reason at first, then refused to get rid of it after it was no longer needed. She kept it for like 14 years? It was pretty nuts. In order to taste food she would eat it and spit it into a cup, around as many people as possible in order to get the most attention.

I wouldn't judge Jacquie by appearance, though. It was a problem at one of my previous jobs where women were often having a hard time getting things like disability stickers for their car because they looked too pretty (the doctor would even tell them to "ugly them self up" so that they wouldn't perceive them as healthy because they looked nice). I do judge her training her own service dog, though. There's a few things on there you would definitely need a professional for (like epilepsy dogs are trained to respond to the owners specific smells and it takes a very long time to do that).

Also for someone who allegedly has as many respitory problems as she does, I imagine a sheddy dog like a golden retriever would be a bad idea.
 
Having been in several different support groups for Reasons over the years, my personal conclusion has been that you go in, get what you need, and get out again. Through the groups you meet friends who're on the same level, so at the very least you end up with a person or two that you can connect with, sometimes intimately, sometimes Facebook and fortnightly cafe dates over tea and bitching. If you're cyclic or are able to somehow haul yourself up to even a moderately better place, support groups can be bad for you if you linger too long. If there's no place for you but down then the support group may well end up being one of the most important things in your life, and in many situations that's the best you can get.

But if you're getting better or even getting better with coping, support groups can end up sucking away what little life remains in you. Both because you're surrounded by people who are rightly or wrongly completely focused on their personal situation and have no ability to look beyond it, or even worse, the group is infested with spiteful bitches who are jealous and angry that you're clawing your way towards daylight. Those spiteful bitches are invariably jealous because a: you're succeeding at something, anything, b: you're getting attention from genuinely decent members of the group who are encouraging and happy for you, and c: you're diverting attention away from said spiteful bitch and we can't have that, can we now?

Invariably (and this isn't just my own personal experience) the spiteful bitch has clawed her way to the top of the food chain, where she squats over a pile of rotting flesh like a vulture. The group is invariably split in their personal opinions of her. There are a small, vocal minority who will gleefully tear to pieces anyone who speaks about her unfavourably, while the majority tiptoe warily around her and pay her lip service so that she doesn't go batshit at them over... well, nothing basically. It's always impossible to figure out what exactly set her off and set it to rights so she is mollified enough to flap back to her foul nest. And invariably, a few days after her tantrum, the word gets out: the spiteful bitch has had a massive crash/relapse and it's all her victim's fault for subjecting the spiteful bitch to such horrific levels of stress.

The problem is, hell if you can see any evidence of the spiteful bitch's worsening condition. She'll whine and sob about how awful she feels, but when you watch her move around you can't see any indications whatsoever of the crippling pain she says that she's enduring, she's perfectly able to spit litres of bile like a champion even though she's supposed to be so severely depressed that she can barely form a sentence, let alone get out of bed, and she can scoff down the large quantities of snacks and treats that she loudly demands in between whining about her crippling, agonising tummy ache.

The best case scenario is that the spiteful bitch is just an awful, awful person who terrorises the group into submission by a combination of passive aggression, unpredictable temper, lying, and exaggeration, and who are eventually told to either shape up or GTFO. The worst case scenario is that the group has its very own full blown personality disorder infestation, and when that happens the only thing you can do is nuke the entire group before an all out bloodbath erupts. The problem that plagues all support groups of any kind is that they are indeed support groups, and by definition are welcoming and none judgemental, and questioning members is not unreasonably seen as impolite.

MBI isn't a new phenomenon. It's an old, old one that's just spread into new territory like a noxious weed. And hell if anyone knows what they can do to kill it.
we know how to kill it. hidden cameras, confrontation by authority figures, and removal of victims from any contact with the MBP or removal of victims/resources from mb/MBI.

it's too bad the hidden cameras thing is such a hot button. in suspect cases it should become mandatory.
 
  • Agree
Reactions: NoFeline
Powerlevel observations: Reading here I feel super lucky that I haven't been treated like I'm drug seeking with my chronic pain. That might be because I've always said no when offered highly addictive opiates like oxycodone, except for when I had no choice but to take it following a serious staph infection in my bad knee following an arthroscopy.
Come to think of it, I'm surprised more munchies don't have arthroscopies in Australia, since they're completely covered by health insurance/medicare. They've opened my knee up several times just to check for deterioration that can't be caught by less invasive means, and it seems to me it's really easy to have a doctor order one. Just complain loudly about joint pain and have nothing meaningful show up on your x-rays and boom - instant day surgery where you have to go under general anesthesia, great for asspats. You even get little scars to go with it if you're into showing off wounds.

That cow from NSW piques my interest, since I don't see Australian munchies that much.

In one post someone said she hadn't been able to get disability for her arm as she can't get a diagnosis and in another someone talked about her receiving centrelink payments so I'm a bit confused as to how/if she got a disability diagnosis. It seems to me it's much easier to get disability support for mental illness than it is for physical disabilities. It's quite hard to even get a disabled parking permit - you need to be unable to walk 100 meters without a break for the majority of the time.
If she gets caught using her arm normally (assuming she's on centrelink for a physical disability and not mental illness) she can completely lose her pension. I hope she gets caught, what an asshole.
 
Would it be appropriate to talk about mental illness fakers here?

https://autumnasphodel.com/149/faking-mental-illness
that article.

Anyone who fakes mental disorders actually does have a mental disorder. They are manipulating the system, generally for personal gain. People who do this do have a mental disorder.
this isn't true. some do it to score drugs (usually benzos), some to get money or get out of work. wanting shit for free, or wanting drugs, aren't the same as having a mental illness. it's theft. grifting. that means a lot of malingerers are not ill in any way at all even though some might have cluster b shit going on. being a criminal doesn't mean you have ASPD.
 
wtf! I can't believe people actually want feeding tubes, ports, etc. I have EDS, and no one who really has EDS wants this crap.

Anyway, I ended up here after finding some sketchy drama queens when looking up EDS stuff (I do participate on one fairly normal medical board, but I normally ignore these type of people or try to get them to tone it down if they are talking about their kid). These thirsty attention whores make life harder for everyone who actually deals with health issues. At least I can lurk and vent here when it pisses me off, or I'm in a generally crappy mood.


As someone who actually has EDS and a feeding tube I 100% agree with this. I mainly use the patient groups to laugh at all the drama and get on with my life.
 
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