You may have read about Christopher, a Dallas-area 8-year-old who has been, without exaggeration, sadistically tortured his whole life, completely robbed of a normal life, in an extreme case of "Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy."
Christopher’s mother treated him as if he was deathly ill from his birth until she was arrested last week: feeding tubes, oxygen tubes, heart tubes, hospice, do-not-resuscitate orders, wheelchairs, 13 surgeries, hundreds of hospital visits. She tried to subject him to a lung transplant. But actually, he was always completely healthy, except for life-threatening blood infections from the tubes. His father took her to family court to stop it, but the court responded by cutting off the father's visitation for the past five years.
Munchausen is a dashing and lighthearted name for a horrible, sadistic form of lifelong child abuse; they really should give it a name as serious and awful as it is. It has many vague and forgettable official names, none of which are remotely as ghastly as they ought to be.
The actual and fictional Baron von Munchausen was a romantic, satirical figure who told unbelieveable but enthralling tales of adventure and derring-do. Regular Munchausen Syndrome is pathetic, it annoys and exploits others but it generally screws up the life of the person with the Syndrome far more than it does other people's. Naming it after a silly character in old movies is the least that the rest of us can do to add a little bit of humor and culture, to slightly leaven the misery and aggravation it imposes on us. It also makes it identifiable and memorable, which greatly increases lay people's (and doctors') likelihood of recognizing it.
But Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy is nothing to joke about. There's nothing cute about it. And the real victims of it are not those who have it, but their innocent children. We need to find a name that's recognizable, memorable, vivid and visceral, but serious.
Finally, the other big problem with this "Syndrome" is that it's a name for whatever mental disorder the perpetrator may be suffering, but the pattern of behavior, the abuse that the children suffer and can even die from, is even more socially real and important than whatever in the perpetrator's heads may be making them do it. It's as if we had a term for "Feline Proximity Induced Restless Leg Syndrome" but no word for "Cat-Kicking." "Itchy Trigger Finger Syndrome" but no word for "Mass Shooting". Kleptomania but not Theft.
And when faced with people who chronically make up diseases, is diagnosing them with a disease really the best way to deal with them?
I have no opinion on whether or how the psychologists should classify this as an official mental disorder, but let's start talking first about the abuse of the children, and only secondarily about the abusers' psychological "Syndrome."
As Confucius said, "First, the rectification of names."