Mother was obviously very clever and moved to another doctor if she didn’t get the answers she wanted. I think what I found I found horrifying was that no one picked up that this poor child was actually not ill. The children were removed and life took another odd turn. Julie finally broke down one day and alerted social services to what was really going on. Somehow this woman and her equally odd husband ( suffering from Agent Orange exposure, alcoholic and over weight with a foul temper) managed to pull the wool over the eyes of many a social worker, doctor and school for many years. They were also bought horses and encouraged to work on the property but this was not as idyllic as it was made out to be by the mother to social services. They were bought toys and clothes ( often they were not allowed to wear them, they were put into a separate room). Even more shocking the family also fostered children for social services and they were not fed properly either. She starved her own children feeding them sugary rubbish and not sensible meals, hence they were skinny and malnourished. Julie’s mother was a nutter basically, the MBP was just one part of her complete lack of parenting ability. She writes through the voice and eyes of her childhood self. Julie writes as she saw the things happening at time, not with the foresight of knowing her mother’s problem as she does when writing the book. Her mother pops pills in her to stop her head aches and strangely the head ache arrives as her mother predicted “I can see your migraines coming Julie…” “ I found that really hard to take in that so many parents were actually making their own children ill deliberately and those poor children were suffering in awful ways because of this.Īlmost from a toddler Julie has been dragged from one doctor to another and put through more and more investigations and tests. I think what I found most shocking was the statistic “It is conservatively estimated that 1,200 new cases of MBP are reportedly annually in the USA with proportional numbers in other countries Based on their populations. Munchausen by proxy is according to Marc Feldman “The single most complex – and lethal – form of maltreatment known today.” Julie is now an expert writer and spokesperson on MBP and an advocate in MBP cases. He suggested that Julie Gregory write a book to share her experience as it might help others.

This book is based on the life of Julie Gregory which started as a blog which was discovered by Marc Feldman a lecturer in Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurobiology at the University of Alabama.

Julie gregory author