Sickened
The True Story of a Lost Childhood
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3.9 • 26 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A powerful and heartbreakingly moving memoir of a survivor of the world’s most lethal and best hidden forms of child abuse.
A young girl is perched on yet another doctor’s examining table, missing yet another day of school. Just 12 years old, she’s tall, skinny and weak. It's 4 pm and she hasn't eaten anything all day. Her mother, on the other hand, seems curiously excited. She’s about to suggest open heart surgery on her child to ‘get to the bottom of this’. She checks her teeth for lipstick and, as the doctor enters, shoots the girl a warning glance. This child will not ruin her plans.
From early childhood, Julie Gregory was continually x-rayed, medicated and operated on – in the vain pursuit of an illness that was all in her mother’s mind. Munchausen by proxy (MBP) is the world’s most dangerous form of child abuse, in which the caretaker – almost always the mother – invents or induces symptoms in her child because she craves attention from medical professionals.
Most MBP children die. Julie Gregory not only found the courage to survive, but to save others.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The first of its kind, this compelling memoir recounts the story of a childhood affected by Munchausen by proxy disease, a.k.a. MBP, a psychological disorder in which caretakers, usually themselves the victims of traumatic abuse,"make an otherwise healthy child sick" as a way of gaining attention and approval. Set in towns of rural obscurity, Gregory's memoir movingly describes how, as a"sick" child, she believed that her constant feelings of exhaustion and lethargy were caused by some illness in herself rather than by her mother's complicated and abusive rituals. When her mother feeds her handfuls of pills, withholds food or instructs her to"act sick," Gregory does as she is told because she wants to please her. Then, undernourished and doped up on drugs for problems that don't exist, Gregory is dragged from hospital to hospital in search of"answers." Interspersed throughout Gregory's narrative are real medical records that show the efforts of dozens of doctors, procedures and surgeries to"heal" her, efforts which instead become the source of new illnesses. Not until adulthood, when she hears a professor describe MPB during a lecture, does Gregory realize what the real problem is. Gregory's impressive and disturbing memoir uncovers the truths of this elusive and disturbing form of child abuse that is often overlooked and misdiagnosed. 22 pages of b&w white photos.
Customer Reviews
Amazing book!
This book was captivating. Very raw and very eye opening! I had trouble putting it down!