Det är svårt att skapa sig en åsikt om denna bok. En väldigt tung berättelse, på samma gång som den är intressant och tankeväckande.

Något som slog mig var att vi i mitt jobb ofta påpekar att det är föräldrarna som bäst känner sitt barn (för så är det, till 99%), de vet hur de mår, när de är sig själva och vilka symptom de har.
I och med denna bok ifrågasätts det påståendet. Nu är ju förstås förekomsten av MBP väldigt låg i Finland, och man kan ju tänka sig att vi kan hålla oss till det tidigare faktum att det är föräldrarna som känner sina barn bäst.

Däremot är jag väldigt "glad" över att ha fått ta del av berättelsen eftersom den är ögonöppnande och man vet aldrig när det kan vara bra att känna igen varningssignalerna när man jobbar med barn på sjukhus.

This book was a little disappointing. More than following the issues of Munchausen by Proxy, the author reveals more about the emotional and physical abuse her mother and father. I was expecting more detail (and I guess more Munchausen issues) then was given.

This disturbing memoir is the account of a mother who intentionally invented symptoms and illness for her daughter to gain attention from medical professionals. This is known as Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome. The best pop culture example is the little girl in the Sixth Sense (Mischa Barton pre-O.C. days). I learned a lot about this syndrome from a short medical introduction; the rest of the book is Julie Gregory’s story. It is heavy, lots of adult content and language. Some of the events that happened to this girl is so sad. It is eerie to see her medical records and disappointing to see how medical professionals overlooked her explanations and implicitly trusted her mother. I feel more informed after reading this but her story truly is horrifying in many aspects and a little depressing. It seemed like she really brushed over her recovery as well, but perhaps that is because there isn’t much known about MPS and not many therapists dealing in that particular specialty.

This is an amazing memoir, and I call it amazing because it never occurred to me that there were families such as Julie Gregory's. I'd heard of Munchausen by Proxy, but J. Gregory's family--not only her mother, but her father and grandparents--are all insane. Her family's lifestyle, while she was growing up, is so far out of the mainstream, that it's incredible that Julie Gregory grew up to be a functioning (and law-abiding)adult. It's a testiment to her strength and intelligence that Ms. Gregory was able to gain such perspective about what happened during her childhood, and to seek emotional freedom from it. I highly recommend this book.

Bravo, Julie. Bravo.

Well... I don't know what to say here. I was very intrigued when I saw a segment about Munchhausen by Proxy on one my favorite daytime doc shows. I immediately added Sickened to my TBR list. Checked a copy out of my local library & away I went...
At first I was moving right along at a fast pace but as I went on, whenever I put the book down I struggled to pick it back up. Something started to rub me the wrong way about this. I can't say for sure but I was getting that little voice inside asking, "really"? What I mean by that is the author really had some super good memories to write with such intense detail. I started to wonder if some or a good portion of this book was somewhat embellished? I'm not saying that is the case, I actually hope that it is because you would not wish this on any child! Before adding this review to Goodreads I actually googled to see if I could find any other reviews & I found that I was not alone...
I'll end on this note & you can come to your own conclusions if you read or have read the book -

Parts of a review by Christi Cassel April 2015:

...My biggest beef about the book, however, is that it hinted of inauthenticity. I’m a bad person for questioning a victim, I know . . . especially because I can’t pinpoint a particularly false-sounding paragraph or inconsistency. For me, the overall vibe of the book just seemed a little too over dramatic and, thus, made it hard for me to take it at face value....

...You can draw your own conclusions, but after my “research,” here is my take: Did Gregory embellish certain stories/details for dramatic affect? It’s certainly possible. But this is not a case of A Million Little Pieces (the book that was originally released as a memoir that became an Oprah’s Book Club pick and #1 bestseller . . . and then was exposed as having been fabricated). The mom denies the allegations of abuse . . . and who wouldn’t?! Münchausen syndrome by proxy is extremely difficult to diagnose, “because of the dishonesty that is involved.” ...

...In short: The book is likely completely true, but it’s so poorly and dramatically written that it seems fake. Just as bad, if you ask me (and, honestly, probably worse).

Like many memoirs, this is a book that had potential. It’s certainly a fascinating topic. And the inclusion of medical records was somewhat interesting. But the overall tone of the book is extremely over dramatic, heavy-handed, and woe-is-me...

Cât de mult am așteptat ca autoarea să facă o schimbare, dar lectura din păcate nu m-a „captivat” pe cât mă așteptam.
Atunci când vezi că propria ta mamă se bucură când ești bolnavă, încearcă să facă să fii bolnavă, atunci îți dai seama că ceva e în neregulă. Julie, știai că ceva nu se leagă, că totul e nenormal, dar în loc să strigi, să te zbați ca toți să știe prin ce treci, ai tăcut. Ai tăcut și cu ce te-ai ales? Cu spirite care te vor bântuie întreaga viață. Strigă! Luptă! Fă ceva!

The blurb and marketing for this book really imply that it’s about Munchausen by proxy, don’t they? Well, it mostly isn’t. It’s mostly about what a terrible person Sandy Gregory is, how abusive and how insane, plus an indictment of the author’s (also abusive) father. MBP isn’t mentioned until Gregory takes a community college psych class and concludes that the symptoms match her mother’s. She also diagnoses her father with paranoid schizophrenia; My Father’s Keeper, published a few years after this, has more on that.

Let me say frankly that I don’t like this “I checked Web MD” method of psychological evaluation. Because the book’s promotional materials emphasize that it includes real medical records, I expected something more definitive. The records do show that Gregory underwent certain procedures and accumulated a variety of strange little diagnoses; they don’t show that she was actually healthy or that she underwent unjustified operations. Kind of the opposite. I kept waiting for the big reveal that the mom was poisoning her or something, but we don’t get beyond a few episodes in which her parents—in grim, dramatic displays of abuse—make her eat disgusting things like matches and dirty tissues. Late in the book, Gregory suggests that her mother effectively starved her into a heart condition by feeding her sugary cereal and Ensure Plus. As someone who basically lived off Ensure during the first trimester of her pregnancy, I thought this was weird. Ensure Plus may taste gross and chalky, and it doesn’t compare to solids like steak and nachos, but it really is designed to replace meals and trigger weight gain—not starve you to premature death. How does this explain Gregory’s long-term ill health, or why she stayed sick after leaving home? For example, why does she “black out on the toilet” while living on her own? (Gregory says: “If everyone around you tells you you’re sick, if they keep testing you for what’s making you sick, do you think, when you’re thirteen, that you aren’t? You feel sick, right?” That makes sense, sure. But it doesn’t explain her symptoms as an adult. Her best explanation for that is that she based her later eating habits on how her mother fed her, which—again—I didn’t really follow.) This book is stuffed with descriptions of gruesome and diverse abuse, but I wondered why Gregory hasn’t included any documentation showing, e.g., the involvement of Child Protective Services, the bankruptcy, the repeated acts of fraud. She ends the book saying that she intends to report Sandy to CPS so that her adoptive children get taken away; she doesn’t say what happens. (Searching online, I read that the children were taken while CPS conducted a 90-day investigation, which ultimately concluded that no abuse occurred and returned them to the home.)

I happen to be reading another memoir of an abusive childhood right now, Educated, and the contrast began to impress me as I finished this book. Westover repeatedly checks her memories against other people’s and against her contemporaneous diary; the nature and trustworthiness of childhood memory (especially memories of trauma) are a major theme. There’s no such introspection here. Gregory’s certainty is lacerating. She even describes working for a medical facility and deliberately denying children appointments because she believes she sees in the kids’ eyes that their mothers have MBP. That creeped me out. And in the “About the Author” section, she bills herself as “an expert writer and spokesperson on Munchausen by proxy and an advocate in MBP cases.” I’m not questioning Gregory’s expertise, but for a syndrome that has (for example) hospital video surveillance of mothers suffocating their own children to trigger a code blue, I’m just disappointed not to see something more substantial and thoughtful here.

Last thing: Gregory throws in a couple bizarre asides that I found both distracting and unpleasant. Specifically, she describes (at needless length) how she entered a wet t-shirt contest to make $100. Then she justifies (at the same needless length) her decision to run away from home to go live with a man twice her age. She continues to describe herself as a “child” through her teens and into her 20s, and only in her 30s does she buy herself a bunch of mirrors and stare at her reflection because she’s finally realized that she’s physically “beautiful.” (She is mesmerized by her own attractiveness, e.g., “I catch a glimpse of myself while walking past a mirror and my face snaps into recognizing the beauty I see before me.”) At age 31, she relies on her mom for necessities, and “for the first time, she was my mom”—she even has to live with her mother again because she’s homeless. All these things could’ve been raw and relatable, but Gregory instead comes off as bitter rather than vulnerable, cagey rather than honest, and uncomfortably reductive. Because she mentions that her parents filed “unruly child” charges against her, complete with documentation (which, it’s implied at one point, may even include pictures of the wet t-shirt contest), the oddly defensive posture of these stories make me think that there’s exculpatory evidence out there that she’s trying to preempt. But who knows. In my brief internet research, I’ve seen posts by Gregory’s mother that passionately deny the allegations in this book, claiming that Gregory was not abused but was rather a wayward unwell kid. I can’t say those posts struck me as terribly credible, either. In the end, this just wasn’t the MBP story I anticipated.

An excellent book to read for those with a need to know and understand this complex illness. For others use your own judgement. This is a very disturbing illness that really created a lot of attention about 10 years ago in the mental health and medical field. 'Sickened' is a very well written page turner, but it is a true story...no fiction here.

“Your reality, sir, is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever” ~ Baron Münchausen.


Hoooooolllllllllllllllyyyyyyyyy crapsickle. Julie Gregory memoirs her childhood as a munchausen by proxy victim and it’s a hell of a gawker story. Not as jarring as The Glass Castle in my opinion but still… Christ… what the hell? People really do suck.


“You looking for the suckers, honey? Here, let me get ‘em for you.”
Mom pulls out a new book of matches and carefully bends back the cover to expose two fresh red rows of the minipops she’s been giving me for as long as aI can remember. My mouth waters when I see their shimmery crimson tips. The first one is always the best, and I pluck it out and get it fast on my tongue, waiting for the metallic zolt to rush my taste buds. Once the hardest layer dissolves, I flop the match against the side of my teeth and crunch the softer bits off the stick, spitting the white flimsy paper to the floor, swallowing the rest.”

Munchausen by proxy… we’ve all seen The Sixth Sense… we remember that little girl in the tent with Haley Joel Osment. She scared the bejeezus out of me. We remember the video of her mother pouring Pine Sol into her soup, right? Yessireee…. My faith in humanity waned big time then.

Definition: “In the Münchausen by Proxy syndrome, an adult care-giver makes a child sick by either fabricating symptoms or actually causing harm to the child, whereby convincing not only the child but others, including medical providers, that their child is sick.” Named after Baron Munchausen, a german nobleman who enjoyed exaggerating and was documented in literature as a sort of ‘cry wolf’ sort.

MBP could be presented in many ways… such as the Pine Sol scene from above or say, poisoning your child with excessive amounts of salt or um….tainting your child’s urine with your own blood… In Julie Gregory’s case it included not feeding your child and then bringing them to the doctor saying that they are listless and weak (duh) or convincing the child that something is wrong with their heart and introducing doctor upon doctor until the mother (it’s usually a female caretaker) finds a doctor willing to run a battery of invasive tests to determine the problem and then screaming at the doctor when he refuses to do open heart surgery on the kid. Hmmm…

There are many incidents in this book that just scream ‘holy jumpin'josaphat!’--- her mother was a pathological liar who had grown up in an abusive situation and demanded attention at all costs. Nature versus Nurture at its best. Half the time I wasn’t sure if I felt bad for the crazy bitch or if I wanted to kick her ass. Of course the kids have little idea of what is happening, they just want to please their parents… so Julie misses school, nods and yeps when her mother explains all the symptoms that Julie has been experiencing. She lets people prod her in those very special places and she gets her chest shaved like half a dozen times so they can test her heart. If only this was all she had to endure…. her mother would often make up lies about the kids to get her husband’s attention, which could result in beatings for the kids. She would often run around their doublewide screaming how horrible her life was and the kids would have to pry the shotgun from her hand when she threatened suicide. Where was this Brady Bunch episode?

The story was a clusterfuck of events and the fact that Gregory could document this AND include photos (adds to the rubbernecking, trust me) shows a committed resolve to get people to pay attention. I was not so fond of the language… it was too flowery or too embellished making her seem more dramatic than she needed to be. Her story stands without the whole broken mirror/shattered image cliché.

I'm not sure what to even say about this book. Most of the time I was reading it I felt just as the title says, sickened. I've read a lot of true crime and child abuse books and it never fails to resonate with me when someone can treat a child like this. This girl went through such terrible, terrible situations as a child, her mother actually succeeding in making her, along with many, many doctors and hospitals, believe she was truly sick and is still dealing with the after effects to this day. Trying time and time again to have a reltionship with either parent when both refuse to own up to what they did, the mother trying to do it all over again to another pair of children making the authors life hell still today. The things done to this child ranged from saying that she "wasn't as pretty as the other girls and never would be" to forcing her to eat an elderly mans "snot rag" (their words, not mine). I was literally sickened the whole time reading this and I'm not sure she could have ever came up with a better title for this book. I'd love the chance to speak with her mother.

Great account of munchausen by proxy, which isn't something you come across too often. Terrible that it takes something like this to raise awareness, though. Worth a read if you work in mental health. Of course now I have this on my mind and I am thinking everyone I meet has MBP...