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

[Petronella]

[OP provided by @Kate Farms Shill, @Feline Darkmage, @MunchOff, and @Ellesse_warrior. Thank you! ]

The Basics:
Munchausen's Syndrome is a psychiatric disorder listed in the DSM. The disease causes the sufferer to draw attention or reassurance to themselves (whether this effort is conscious or not on the part of the sufferer is still debatable). It is named after the fictional character (who was loosely based on a real person) Baron Munchausen, who would frequently tell tall tales of his own struggles in life.

There are a couple of subcategories. These are "Munchausen's by Proxy" and "Munchausen's by Internet". This thread will focus on communities built by and for people who have this and asspat each other in online circlejerks instead of getting actual mental/medical help for the root of their issues.

Why Are They Also Called "Spoonies"?:
From lolcow.farm, "What Is A "Spoonie"?

People who identify as 'Spoonies' are referencing 'The Spoon Theory,' written by a woman with lupus to explain the chronic illness experience to a healthy friend who asked her what it really feels like to live with her medical problems. More on spoon theory

The 'Spoonie' Community is, in general, a legitimate supportive network for people dealing with chronic illness. In recent years, however, it has become polluted with SJW types and has attracted a new breed of attention-seeking catfish: people who lie about, fake having, and/or exaggerate existing medical problems and crises for no benefit other than to garner attention.

Links:
current /snow/ thread
Wikipedia Page on Munchausen's by Internet
Time Magazine Article
Guardian Article
Reader's Digest Article
the Stranger Article
Website about the Disease (Written by Psychiatrist Dr. Mark Feldman)

Examples:
Kadeelyn Konstantino, possibly the most famous lolcow to come from this community. She died early in 2017 from an undisclosed cause, possibly related to her often inaccurate diagnoses.

Belle Gibson is an Australian woman who was covered in a Guardian piece after being caught faking a battle against Cancer. Wikipedia article


There is a lot of former posters of the /r/illnessfakers subreddit. For those that stumble straight in here: It will be discussed a lot. It is a munchie echo chamber and us kiwis like to sit here and mock the mess that it is.

Here is an alphabetical directory of people who are discussed in this thread:

Abby/Abby Cappleman/Abby the Aspienaut: Has her own thread. Autism/EDS faker and service dog sperg who throws a scene at any business who doesn't let her pet Shih Tzu come in with her. Parents know she's full of shit.

Alexys D. Jones/ Jonzie : Claims GP and a whole host of heart condishuns/ heroin addict. Previous Lolcow favorite due to her inappropriate attachment to her doctor (Mama Bear). Still goes to a childrens hospital. DFE'd but still has a private insta.

Amanda Baggs: Has her own thread. was a gifted but weird teenager, did a lot of drugs, now claims to have severe, non-verbal autism and gastroparesis that requires a PEG-j despite being enormous. Wears her dead dad's clothes. Actually has PCOS and a healthy beard to prove it.

Amanda/Ren: Only sometimes comes up here, usually by IF veterans. Fakes literally every disease she hears of, poorly. Her own family constantly tells her to quit her bullshit.

Amanda/Skinwalker: Former Jaquie acolyte, anorexic, munchie combo plus Guillain-Barre Syndrome. Used to copy Jaquie to a terrifying degree until Jaquie tried to steal GBS from her.

Amy/Chronically Amy: anorexic, exceedingly stupid Jaquie-clone nursing student. Once claimed to have CF and be terminal but dropped that lie. GFM scammer.

Amy Lee Fisher/Chronically Ams: EDS/POTS/GP/MCAS and hypokalemic periodic paralysis faker on TPN who likes to purge through her tubes and then drink champagne and eat burgers when no one's looking. Shoops herself skinny.

Anelise/Tina/ts.fight: super duper anorexic, often suicide baits, claims the typical munchie combo platter, fucks with all her tubes and lines.

Anna/Ginge/Fit Vegan Ginger: Has her own thread. Jesus-freak skelly who claims to have cystic fibrosis and just got an ostomy. Formerly known for making absolutely atrocious low calorie vegan foods that Kiwis had a fun time making and torturing ourselves and our loved ones with.

Anqi/Angie/Skagra: has her own thread. Claims complex regional pain syndrome after falling down some stairs and is totally bedbound and will DIE IF YOU DON'T DONATE TO HER RIGHT NOW. Inactive.

Ash/Ashley Isaacs/Lich Queen: Has her own thread. not a munchie. Just a hardcore anorexic who refuses to die or seek help. Used only as an example of how much abuse a human body can take. Do not feel pity for her as she is a hateful human being who sabotages other ana-chans' recovery efforts and was so insufferable her mother moved across the country to get away from her.

Aubs/Aubrey's Lyme Journey: has her own thread; Lyme/cancer/EDS/GP faker. Inactive.

Cassie/CassieMNolin: former godawful ballerina, claims the combo platter plus complex regional pain syndrome, also claims to have recurring bouts of amnesia that cause her to forget her husband and have to "fall in love with him all over again." Had a party when she got her port.

Christine/SickbedPrincess: has lupus her stupid doctors are too dumb and mean to diagnose. Obsessed with Victorian-era tragic suffering, purple prose, downvoted to oblivion wherever she posts. Came here to sperg and Got her own thread out of it. People then started ignored her by talking about Victorian corsets, radioactive candies and basically anything but her.

ChronicZebra not discussed often here, usually only brought up by former /r/illnessfakers redditors. Part time munchie, too sick to have a job during the week but is always feeling better to hike and have other adventures during the weekend

Courtney/ChronicallyCourt: has her own thread; gerson therapy idiot, claims a vaccine gave her Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome which is not how genetics do. Tried to make a very sick puppo be her service dog.

Dani/LifeofDani/ChronicallyDani: legitimately re.tarded former anorexic, drug-seeker, fakes gastroparesis, POTS, fibromyalgia, et al and now Rheumatoid Arthritis. Inserted her own NG tubes that she bought off the internet because her doctors wouldn't tube her. Chimps out if you question anything she does. Regularly DFEs so check recent posts for current sicksta.

Jan/the raw life: Jaquie's best friend turned Single White Female. Made an appalling performance of Jaquie’s funeral and is in control of Jaquie's social media. She now wears her clothes and has also inherited her barbie car/wheelchair.
SPOILER: JANS EPIC FUNERAL SPEECH

Janaye/servicedogcolt: has her own thread. Primarily fakes epilepsy, famous for taking selfies of what looks like chocolate pudding coming out of her mouth and claiming it's blood. Superficially sliced her head open and stapled it back together to make it look like she had a craniotomy. GFM scammer.

Jaquie/ChronicallyJaquie. Former queen of the munchies, now rendered to ash after she munched herself to death. Has her own thread, inactive/dead.

Julian/thedisabledhippie: FTM transgendered former BFF of Jaquie, claims all the same disorders Jaquie did but also demyelinating polyneuropathy. Julian and Jaquie traded diagnoses like baseball cards when they were friends.

Kat/KatVonWheels: went from skinny to morbidly obese and married to divorced in the same time frame, all because she wanted to be on TPN but also to continue to eat junk food. Bought a hospital bed for her house. Timeline: from skinny bitch to whale

KaydeeLynn: has her own thread but she's dead. Morbidly obese anorexic, faked the most insane crises ever like multiple pulmonary emboli and a coma, but her family would confirm she was on the couch eating cheetos while she claimed this. Died of a heroin overdose while trying to make it seem like she was a hardcore addict for internet sympathy.

Katy/ Invisiblei/ invidisible Katy: Asbergers and Fibromyalgia, welsh chronic illness Youtuber, used to post a lot of videos about how to navigate the benefit system. Twitter

Kelly Carragher/Palette Face: Kaydee's friend. Anorexic, now claims to have hundreds of seizures per day unless she wants to go on vacation.

Kelly Ronahan/Vampire Kelly: has her own thread. DO NOT POST IN HER THREAD UNLESS YOU HAVE NEW CONTENTbecause she's fucking crazy and posts her dox/gossip all the time trying to bait us into talking about her. Used to drain her blood through her port to get transfusions, now picks at her necrotic legs and fakes Behcet's. Has a whole subplot about a satanic pimp who stalks her, forced her to eat a dog, and crazy glued her hand to her vagina. As of July 2019 an amputation is looking likely as her docs refuse to help her because they wasted time on a previous skin graft for her.

Morgan/Morgan's Medical Journey: Claims to have "Brain on Fire" autoimmune encephalitis. Weirdly codependent relationship with her mother.

Nicole/JustbreatheNicole: admits she has a psychosomatic vomiting condition and has never lost weight from it, but needs a feeding tube anyway because therapy is hard. Inactive?

NinaJean/kittenbread: founded /r/Illnessfakers to hide the fact that she's a gigantic munchie herself. Screeches about disability access and tries to sue people to get into the papers. Timeline of the munchie mod

Robyn Brown (better known as LifeUndiagnosed and HybermobileGeek) is a Munchie case that was once described by a lolcow.farm anon as "Kadeelyn on Steroids". She is a British woman who has been blogging about her supposed illnesses for years upon years, and frequently hops to a new alias once people catch on to her fakery and she loses her sweet asspats.

Sarah-Jean Claims she has a condition that is illegal to diagnose. She has badly trained service dog and is currently gunning for an EDS diagnosis Timeline of her here and it is LONG because she truly is a goldmine.

Tara: dead as fuck and no1curr.

Tina: see Anelise

In the incubator
AgonyAutie British, claims autism and is yet another EDS faker. Autists have came here and said her autism looks fake too. Has meltdowns on trains on the regular so she can get in the papers. Some info/pics here

Carly/Chronicarly: athlete turned spoonie. Has a port between her tits for some reason. Likes to paint on her body for "awareness". Turns out she is also BrochureAnon another ex-mod from /r/illnessfakers and former low cow muchie thread poster because the internet is full of jokes. Great photos of her here including one with a giant dildo.

Diaryofamunchiekid As the name suggests this one claims she is battling Munchausens.

Janina/AssistanceDogAdventures: friends with Amy Lee Fisher. Service dog sperg. Walks out on any doctor that doesn't tell her exactly what she wants to hear.

Kiera/AdventuresofaZebraSpoonie: Has a list of diagnoses longer than your entire CV. Former ballerina. All the usual tubes and lines.

Tubefedtraveler: insta name says it all with this bitch. Made a big deal once
because she ate something and was fine and how she was scared she would end up on “The Reddit” for it. which is exactly what happened

Victoria/LemonsnLyme: as the name suggests, "chronic lyme" sufferer. Tries to fix her non-existent health problems with a toxin-free existence.

 

[BT 075]

baby must be pretty damn handicapped if it came out as a plastic doll

 

[Surtur]

I hate people like this.

 

[harvey dirdban]

If that baby had been real, it would've been a cyclops. She didn't even bother to google the condition her baby supposedly had.

 

[Meowthkip]

If that baby had been real, it would've been a cyclops. She didn't even bother to google the condition her baby supposedly had.

It's hard to find dolls of cyclops babies.

 

[Dilligaff]

You mean it would have been Asperia?

 

[Petronella]

Funny enough, the doll was her undoing. One of Beccah's followers owned the same model of ReBorn and couldn't help noticing the similarities between her doll and Beccah's "child."

 

[Artard]

Oh boy. I met Beccah about six months or so after the fallout of her Dead Baby Blues. She was a friend of my brother's wife. The two things I took away from this are:

1. She was obsessed with being pregnant, maybe more broadly with "pregnancy" in general. I think there's a psychiatric term for this but you really didn't need a degree to pick up on it. It was like meeting a crazy man that thinks they're Napoleon, her obsessions were so close to the surface.

2. It still amazes me that there exists this bubble which internet infamy (and even local news infamy, as she Beccah's hoax was pretty extensively covered here) can't penetrate. Neither my brother's wife nor anyone around her really had much of an idea of what was going on -- just some vague notion that she was kind of at the center of something-something with people saying something-something about her.

 

[BriarHeart]

I'll never understand people who fetishize or obsess over pregnancy as a concept. I mean, sure, miracle of life and propagation of the species and yaddayaddayadda, but from the outside, all it looks like is this:

Spoiler: tw: blood, gore, Sigourney Weaver

 

[Petronella]

I'll never understand people who fetishize or obsess over pregnancy as a concept. I mean, sure, miracle of life and propagation of the species and yaddayaddayadda, but from the outside, all it looks like is this:

Spoiler: tw: blood, gore, Sigourney Weaver

Because pregnant women get attention and free stuff.

 

[DrChristianTroy]

Can someone explain how this person is a lolcow? I mean other than some obvious issues with pregnancy and a scam does she do anything particularly lolcowish?

 

[Artard]

Lolcows are bizarre people/groups/events

Check.

that are on the Internet

Check.

and respond negatively to people in a funny way

Beccah proceed to tell more whoppers denying she received money & gifts from the blog, denying she has dozens of sock-puppets, and that she has been reading about & defending herself online 24/7 since her scam was exposed. She whined on and on about "past traumas" that are nothing more than older lies told to lots more gullible people. Even more hilarious for the first two days her apology was posted it was signed "April's Mom."

 

[DrChristianTroy]

Don't think that's too funny but whatevs.

 

[Artard]

Don't think that's too funny but whatevs.

Your contributions to this and other threads remain as invaluable as ever. Do you have an internet newsletter I can subscribe to?

 

[Durable Mike Malloy]

The April Rose hoax was amazing, like Peter Coffin crossed with a dead baby joke and defended by the dumbest, most sanctimonious white knights imaginable. It's absolutely bonkers that this woman is back online and still asking for money.

 

[SPARKLETWAT]

Classic Munchausen by internet. People that get off on pretending to be sick or dying for attention and gifts. They're disgusting attention whores who take away from people who are actually terminal and they piss me the fuck off.

///ETA: There's a blog that's all about exposing fakes. It's not updated a lot but it's full of lulz. http://www.warriorelihoax.com/

 

[Dalish]

Has she done anything recently? It seems strange that someone with such a long track record of scamming would stop, despite being caught. A lot of the munchausen by Internet cases get revealed, but the perpetrator nonetheless comes back for more and to address the 'haters'.

 

[Artard]

Classic Munchausen by internet. People that get off on pretending to be sick or dying for attention and gifts. They're disgusting attention whores who take away from people who are actually terminal and they piss me the fuck off.

///ETA: There's a blog that's all about exposing fakes. It's not updated a lot but it's full of lulz. http://www.warriorelihoax.com/

Maybe this is the fodder for a larger thread about Munchausen By Internet? Coming across a classic MBI case or a compulsive liar/attention seeker with the potential to tear a community apart is kind of a rite of passage on the internet -- it's happened so often it's not even particularly noteworthy except in its scope.

The original "Warrior Eli" described on that site is a good example, as it went on for years. The saga of "Jesse Jubilee James" is another one -- one dumpy, lonely woman made up (and in many cases performed as) dozens of different characters in a multi-year hoax that went on long after her "main character" had succumbed to cancer.

I guess with how common it is, it's maybe less interesting to ask "why people do it" than "why people believe?" I've always thought that the anonymity of the internet encouraged skepticism -- people feeling less ashamed of asking hard questions of truly extraordinary medical circumstances?

But maybe it says something positive that people are willing to believe and be taken advantage of time and time again -- even when situations seem practically designed to invoke sympathy or garner attention.

 

[Durable Mike Malloy]

I guess with how common it is, it's maybe less interesting to ask "why people do it" than "why people believe?" I've always thought that the anonymity of the internet encouraged skepticism -- people feeling less ashamed of asking hard questions of truly extraordinary medical circumstances?

But maybe it says something positive that people are willing to believe and be taken advantage of time and time again -- even when situations seem practically designed to invoke sympathy or garner attention.

You know, that's a very good point. For example, @For The Internet and I both participated in online communities that were fleeced by the same scammer under various guises. Interestingly, Chris Izer-Bedell appears to have targeted self-identified skeptics and critical thinkers. She'd gain community ingress under a persona that had the ring of truth, and then proceed to muddy the waters by playing off other members' lived experiences and strong emotions. By the time she started asking for money, those of us who suspected her of being a fraud were reluctant to speak up.

This woman took advantage of people's desire to remedy injustice and create a world that is kinder and more fair, leading ordinarily-circumspect individuals to behave in an extremely gullible way.

And when lots of people are willing to think, "Well, maybe this is all bullshit, but there's a tiny chance it's true and it costs me practically nothing to send $5/a little care package/whatever, so I guess I'll do it anyway," the overall community atmosphere of generosity and goodwill is very difficult to puncture.

After all, who really aspires to be this guy?

Spoiler: nice meme

A competent scammer will see your Javert and raise you - say - Fantine. It's amazing how the same thing unfolds, over and over again.

 

[Ariel]

You know, that's a very good point. For example, @For The Internet and I both participated in online communities that were fleeced by the same scammer under various guises. Interestingly, Chris Izer-Bedell appears to have targeted self-identified skeptics and critical thinkers. She'd gain community ingress under a persona that had the ring of truth, and then proceed to muddy the waters by playing off other members' lived experiences and strong emotions. By the time she started asking for money, those of us who suspected her of being a fraud were reluctant to speak up.

This woman took advantage of people's desire to remedy injustice and create a world that is kinder and more fair, leading ordinarily-circumspect individuals to behave in an extremely gullible way.

And when lots of people are willing to think, "Well, maybe this is all bullshit, but there's a tiny chance it's true and it costs me practically nothing to send $5/a little care package/whatever, so I guess I'll do it anyway," the overall community atmosphere of generosity and goodwill is very difficult to puncture.

After all, who really aspires to be this guy?

Spoiler: nice meme

View attachment 14042
A competent scammer will see your Javert and raise you - say - Fantine. It's amazing how the same thing unfolds, over and over again.

That wasn't free jinger was it?



I think we need a general lolcow thread for this. Because there are other really interesting occurrences such as 'Valerie'