Sickened

So I’ve just finished reading Sickened: The True Story of a Lost Childhood. It’s not for the faint of heart.

This is the story of Julie Gregory, whose childhood was dominated by her mysterious illness. At her mother’s insistence, they would see doctor after doctor, putting her through tests, dietary restrictions and even surgery. In the end, every physician concluded that there was nothing wrong with her. Julie’s mother would fume at their incompetence, bringing her to still more hospitals and specialists, telling anyone and everyone that her child was sick, dammit. They had to get to the bottom of this.

But the only sickness was in her mother’s mind.

Sickened is a story about a bizarre form of child abuse. Munchausen syndrome refers to a person feigning illness to garner attention and sympathy. Munchausen by proxy (MBP) is doing the same to someone under the perpetrator’s care – typically a spouse or a child. The author describes being told to ‘act sick’ as a child, while her mother lied to doctors about headaches, nausea, fevers, heart problems, and more.

The setting is backcountry America during the 70s and 80s. Julie’s mother is a tragic, manic figure beneath a mask of normality, herself subjected to horrible abuse in adolescence. Her father is saddled with an inferiority complex, violent when enraged and addicted to television. Her younger brother is the only normal one of them. While there are warm and even comical scenes, dysfunction abounds. On their isolated farm in Ohio, foster children and aging war veterans brought in for the government funding they represent are also subject to mistreatment and neglect.

The author’s ‘illness’ is the core of the story, however. As she grows, she is medicated, malnourished, emaciated and overworked with farm chores, all at her mother’s behest. Her schoolwork suffers, with teachers and peers eyeing her as though she could drop dead at any time. The real tragedy is that the author actually wanted to be sick, to gain her mother’s approval. The illness became her identity.

MBP is highly controversial, with good reason. It’s hard to believe a mother could do all this to her child. The first few times the author strikes up the courage to tell others the truth, she is met with scorn and flat disbelief. Only as a young adult, living free of her parents at last, does she begin the slow and painful process of growing beyond the imaginary illness that consumed her life.

Disturbing though they are, stories like this put things in perspective. Despite all my worries, I’ve got it pretty good. Other people’s lives have been far worse than my own.

Sickened is an extreme example of something that I think is, sadly, quite common: growing up convinced there’s something wrong with you. You’re too loud, quiet, fat, thin, quirky, boring. The list could go on forever.

When all along, the only thing wrong with you is the belief that there’s something wrong with you.

I’m not sure whether to recommend the book or not. It’s slim, less than 250 pages. But I don’t think this counts as light reading.