Caught Hurting Their Children
A new medical study is urging hospitals across the nation to use hidden cameras to catch mothers with a disturbing mental illness known as "Munchausen Syndrome by proxy." The disorder causes parents, starved for attention, to abuse their own children, switching medications, injecting their children with urine, and even suffocating them to keep them sick.
The women, desperate for sympathy, may associate comfort and protection with a hospital.
Researchers at Scottish Rite Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia used cameras over a four-year period to monitor parents suspected of this type of child abuse. Twenty-three of forty-one suspected cases of child abuse were diagnosed this way.
Beatrice Yorker, an expert in Munchausen, spoke with CBS News Early Show Anchor Bryant Gumbel from Atlanta.
She explained that parents will go to great lengths to deceive doctors and obscure the fact that they are causing the child's illness or lying about the child's illness.
Therefore, Yorker -– who is a lawyer in addition to being a nursing professor -- is a proponent of hospitals using covert video surveillance. She says the surveillance does not run afoul of constitutional rights.
"I've looked at all the cases on wiretapping and entrapment," says Yorker. "The risks to the child of inaccurate diagnosis, for example, if it's a life-threatening condition, the child is being poisoned, the risks of allowing them to be subjected to that is so much worse than the risk of invading some adult's privacy."
In one case in the Atlanta study, specialists could not explain a child's recurring E. coli infections. Cameras caught the mother injecting her own urine into the child's intravenous line.
In another case, a mother gagged herself and vomited, then told the doctors the vomit was her child's. Another child, suffered baffling episodes of fatigue – until cameras showed the mother injecting chemicals into her child's gastronomy tube.
Eleven of the 23 Munchausen mothers worked in medicine in some form, and eight reported a history of sexual or other abuse. However, Yorker is pleased that the Atlanta study was reluctant to establish a "profile" of a classic Munchausen mother.
"Many of the things like a very concerned and overly concerned and medically knowledgeable mother have been reported in the literature. But there are many parents of chronically ill children who are also overly attentive and have a lot of medical knowledge. So we hesitate to make the diagnosis based on profile," said Yorker.
Another obstacle to making the diagnosis is that some doctors are reluctant to diagnose Munchausen by proxy, because it forces them to realize they had unwittingly done exactly what the mothers craved by ordering expensive tests and providing sympathy and attention.
Yorker says that there is an argument that Munchausen shouldn't be called an illness, "that we should call it child abuse and not be concernewith the motivations of the parent. Just as in pedophilia, we don't need to diagnose the perpetrator to know abuse has occurred."
Interestingly, when spouses of caught Munchausen parents are told, their response is split. "Half of the spouses protect the child from the abuser and leave the abuser," says Yorker. "The other half support the abuser even if it means losing their child. They are dependent."