Sickened and sickening
Sickened: The True Story of a Lost Childhood is one of those books that shocks you to the core but is at the same time compelling reading. How can it be that a young and vulnerable child presents to so many professionals and yet behind the scenes endures such appalling misery? And this story is real not fiction.
Julie Gregory was in thrall to her disturbed mother, Sandy. She spent her entire childhood being investigated for symptoms of ill health because Sandy insisted she should do so. Many of the tests were invasive and traumatising. Her mother took her from doctor to doctor looking for ever more serious diagnoses; she even took steps to induce symptoms. And before each professional Julie obeyed Sandy’s instructions, playing her part of the ailing daughter to perfection.
In addition, life at home was chaotic and damaging, with both her parents physically violent, and her mother repeatedly blackmailing the family with claims that she was about to take her own life.
It was only when Julie was 26, had left home, and was attending psychology classes, that she finally understood that her mother had fabricated her illnesses and even induced some of them. She had her own methods of compelling Julie to lie to doctors to substantiate her claims of alarming symptoms. When she was thirteen, Julie did once blurt out to a nurse that her mother had made her ill that time, but she was not believed and they ‘sedated the truth’ out of her. She buried much of what happened deep in her subconsciousness and it took years of therapy and painful work on her part to address the reality and deal with the trauma.
Curiously, for a long time after she’d left home she retained a visceral need to stay in touch with her mother.
I am a half-formed larva without her … I speak to her as if nothing has happened, as if everything is fine. I still try to extract love from her. I still take her suicide calls in the middle of the night and try to talk her out of the gun or the overdose from two thousand miles away. I am the only one who can save her. I could not live with myself if my mother died because I refused to do what she trained me so well for.
She kept quiet. But when she eventually felt able to visit Sandy face to face and saw history repeating itself with an under-nourished 11-year-old relative of her current boyfriend she knew she must act to save this girl succumbing to her mother’s manipulations; from becoming yet another victim of Munchausen’s by Proxy (now known as Fabricated or Induced Illness).
It’s seven years now since I published my novel on this issue (Killing me Gently) but this real life account of the devastating impact of this condition (Sickened) resurrected some of the emotions I felt trying to get inside the skin of someone who could do such horrific things to an innocent child. Sickened. No wonder it’s been described as one of the world’s most hidden and dangerous forms of child abuse.
A brave and disturbing book.