General news about Fabricated and Induced Illness syndrome (FFI)

Andy said:
‘It’s destroyed us’: Parents of children with long Covid accused of making it up

"Parents of children with long Covid claim they have been accused of faking or exaggerating their child’s illness, leading to social services’ involvement and, in some instances, court cases and the threat of the child’s removal from the home.

Doctors struggle to diagnose the condition due to its complex range of symptoms and often treat it as a psychological rather than physical disease, with parents telling i they have been accused of child abuse and of fabricating the illness as a result.

Experts have compared the situation to the way professionals have previously dismissed ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis), an almost identical disease in terms of the variety of debilitating symptoms and lack of universal diagnosis or treatment. ME is a complex neurological disorder that causes symptoms such as chronic pain and exhaustion and, in very severe cases, can be fatal."

https://inews.co.uk/news/parents-children-long-covid-accused-making-up-3034629
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What I don’t fully get is how something can be put on a list so categorically without good science snd case studies to differentiate

guven how many and how much the process costs the idea that funding more biomed physicians and support for ME/CFS so you don’t have the ‘just in case’ or ‘maybe it is’ because someone doesn’t feel qualified to rule out a suggestion and has been told of awful consequences (gif themselves too) if the get it wrong one way only as the only way to do it?
 
Merged thread

‘It’s destroyed us’: Parents of children with long Covid accused of making it up

Parents of children with long Covid claim they have been accused of faking or exaggerating their child’s illness, leading to social services’ involvement and, in some instances, court cases and the threat of the child’s removal from the home.

Doctors struggle to diagnose the condition due to its complex range of symptoms and often treat it as a psychological rather than physical disease, with parents telling i they have been accused of child abuse and of fabricating the illness as a result.

Experts have compared the situation to the way professionals have previously dismissed ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis), an almost identical disease in terms of the variety of debilitating symptoms and lack of universal diagnosis or treatment. ME is a complex neurological disorder that causes symptoms such as chronic pain and exhaustion and, in very severe cases, can be fatal.

One in five parents of children with ME are referred to social services, according to Tymes Trust, an ME charity. Families and doctors warn this is now increasingly occurring with long Covid.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics show an estimated 62,000 children aged two to 16 years have reported suffering from long Covid.

But parents have told i that when they have sought a diagnosis from their GP, or cited it as a reason for their children missing school, they have been accused of FII (fabricated or induced illness) – a form of child abuse in which a parent exaggerates or causes their child’s illness.
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‘It’s destroyed us’: Parents of children with long Covid accused of making it up (msn.com)
 
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One mother, Lorraine Rowley, who has cerebral palsy, said she was referred to social services after her daughter, Ruby, then aged 12, contracted Covid in March 2020.

The once bright child, who sang in the church choir, took dance classes and made everyone’s packed lunches each morning, became bed-ridden and unable to walk or count to ten.

At first, staff at the hospital believed it was multi-inflammatory syndrome and put her on steroids. But after repeated hospitalisations and tests that elicited no results, “they started pointing the finger at us,” Ms Rowley says.
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“The consultant started saying that because I’m already in a wheelchair ‘maybe [she] wants to be disabled like her mum.’”

Ruby was diagnosed with functional neurological disorder (FND), previously known as hysteria, and her family was reported to social services under suspicion of FII.

“[The local consultant] said: ‘This child is in danger, we need to get her out of the home,’ and that we were harming our Ruby and wanted her to be disabled,” says Ms Rowley, 46. “When she kept saying she was in pain, they said, ‘You’re not in pain, you don’t need pain relief.'”
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For crying out loud.
 
Ash said:
how the British medical establishment views disabled parents and their disabled children
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Wider even than that awful context. It's how any parent and any child is viewed: as an unreliable witness and reporter of their own experiences. All countermanded by the unevidenced ideas of professionals who reckon they know what's going on.

Inevitably longitudinal studies are going to show the severe damage done to a generation of children. Eg just on the cardiovascular effects, let alone neurodevelopmental/accelerated neurodegenerative: Post-Acute Cardiovascular Outcomes of COVID-19 in Children and Adolescents: An EHR Cohort Study from the RECOVER Project (2024, Preprint: MedRxiv) —

Our study involved 297,920 children and adolescents with COVID-19 and 915,402 without COVID-19. We found that those infected with SARS-CoV-2 exhibited increased risks for a range of post-acute cardiovascular outcomes, with RR between 1.26 and 2.92. These outcomes included hypertension, ventricular arrhythmias, myocarditis, heart failure, cardiomyopathy, cardiogenic shock, thromboembolism, chest pain, and palpitations
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SNT Gatchaman said:
Wider even than that awful context. It's how any parent and any child is viewed: as an unreliable witness and reporter of their own experiences. All countermanded by the unevidenced ideas of professionals who reckon they know what's going on.

Inevitably longitudinal studies are going to show the severe damage done to a generation of children. Eg just on the cardiovascular effects, let alone neurodevelopmental/accelerated neurodegenerative: Post-Acute Cardiovascular Outcomes of COVID-19 in Children and Adolescents: An EHR Cohort Study from the RECOVER Project (2024, Preprint: MedRxiv) —
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Yeah it’s beyond awful. It’s so bad I can’t capture it in words. When that researcher (?) said Covid was a an existential threat to humanity equal to climate change, I had to think on that one for a bit but I think he has a terrifying chance of being correct. Because as quickly as climate change is destroying us it maybe that Covid brain damage will make us incapable of addressing climate change or keeping ourselves alive. In any case it’s not gonna help us thrive to keep trying to wipe ourselves out like this is it?


A part of me thinks well this is just the logical end to capitalism, just a run away train. But another part of me wonders what the percentage of very rich people with bunkers in ANZ are in this particular regard trying to wipe us all out as their solution to climate change. Just them and ten of the most awful people in the world left to have at it with all the carbon. :unsure:

On your point about all parents and children I’d push back a little. Only the sick ones who don’t recover and become disabled are targeted. It’s a punishment upon the parents for having a disabled child and a punishment upon the child for being disabled.

I know that doctors are giving out FFI like candy treats for themselves and even a one off, or a first visit to hospital with sepsis or something is a risk, but it’s only a risk of being labelled ‘mentally ill’ and malicious that’s the danger.
Because as we can see they are fine with the malicious part so long as it is them ever so sanely doing it, not some mad mother.

The mother who was a wheelchair user with a non contested disease, gets framed as trying to make her daughter presumed non disabled, into a wheelchair user. Whereas the other mothers with only FFI as their presumed disability are still disabled and seen to be seeking to disable their children and that that’s the reason the children end up disabled or believing themselves to be. It’s a disabled people are evil trope. But the doctors aren’t offering to help the children recover from their ordeal at the hands of their mothers by asking them how they feel and what they need they are just like off you go and stop crying for pain killers come back when you’re not sick anymore.


What if the daughter actually did want to be disabled? This is vanishingly unlikely because no doubt she would see plenty of discrimination and prejudice against her mother on account of her disability status, and not be too keen to have to deal with that herself. But just imagine if she did and she wanted it to be disability status due to a mobility impairment such that she needed a wheelchair. She could just say her legs hurt or some other isolated part of her body beg borrow or steal a wheelchair and live happily travelling about in it until she got board of the experiment. No big deal. But no the doctor actually chose to identify the almost certainly all in his mind problem of a child wanting to be like their disabled parent, as the major threat. Because if the mum was FFI that the child’s feelings about being disabled or not wouldn’t be relevant. If the child wanted the same shoes as their mum no one would perceive that as a sign of mental illness, but a wheelchair that’s an abomination.

Also disabled parents lose custody of the kids at higher rates than non disabled parents. It’s just most disabled parents aren’t wheelchair users, because most disabled people don’t happen to be wheelchair users. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if wheelchair users aren’t at higher risk even than other disabled people, but I don’t know about that.
 
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SNT Gatchaman said:
For crying out loud.
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The bit about wanting to be in a wheelchair and lines like that would have got someone sacked and unlikely to be employed anywhere else or arrested for hate speech until these people started pretending their manifestos were ‘research’ to ‘cover’ for it.

but it’s the same. Shouldn’t doctors or professionals who say these things be being grabbed by HR or the police and escorted out of the building with the option of the parent suing?

I just wanted to remember what ‘normal’ wrote like and say it out loud as therapy against the dystopia
 
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SNT Gatchaman said:
For crying out loud.
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And this sadistic refusing people in pain pain relief when it’s obvious claiming a ‘belief in hysteria because they are women’ well surely that should be prosecutable as something like assault (and detention where they are detained for long times in such pain) under false pretences or unsubstantiated beliefs ie legally it should surely work both ways and there obviously needs to be penalties that covers what is being used so that describing these tactics and categorising then as a crime isn’t what is standing in the way of people seeing it's harm ?


Otherwise anyone can play with hurting people they don’t like by using their power to tell everyone to leave them in agony for months causing irreparable harm…. And no one even the law is saying that’s harm with no good reason and citing a belief in nonsense hysteria based stuff because you’ve an issue with females or disabled people or some other issue should absolutely not be when there is no science allowed as an excuse or cover - it wouldn’t be for normal non scientific individuals so why does this almost religion ‘belief’ crap hold as legal cover here?
 
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bobbler said:
The bit about wanting to be in a wheelchair and lines like that would have gif someone sacked and unlikely to be employed anywhere else or arrested fir hate speech until these people started pretending their manifestos were ‘research’ to ‘cover’ for it.

but it’s the same. Shouldn’t doctors or professionals who say these things be being grabbed by HR or the police and escorted out of the building with the option of the parent suing?

I just wanted to remember what ‘normal’ wrote like and say it out loud as therapy against the dystopia
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You’re right @bobbler its really is a eugenics fuelled manifesto posing medical research, a physical torture of children through denial of medical treatment and pain management, children you also emotionally traumatise through removing them from the security of their families and holding them captive in a place where people are incapable of caring about child welfare in any meaningful sense are abusing them and calling this child protection.

Underlying this there is a deep ideological drive to expel disabled people from public and family life, back into the institutions where these medical professionals believe that disabled people belong. It’s a horrific backlash against a short period of increased disability rights that were hard won by disabled activists and advocates who literally laid their bodies on the line in the roads etc to get them.

These people were always always keen to preserve their power over others, especially over those with historical relatively less power.

I don’t think doctors nurses social workers and judges who participate in the proceedings are having a fundamentally different attitudes to disabled people especially when these are women and children, than before FFI exploded into the mainstream, but I do think we hear about it more nowadays because people can speak to each other on social media about what’s happening or happened to them.

I will say that if rates of these proceedings are higher than in the past, it might be because many medical professionals with the most humanitarian values behind their practice of medicine and treatment of other people in general, are leaving or have left due to political pressures from above and worsening working conditions and their conscientious desire to actually alleviate human suffering through practice of medicine is constantly thwarted, at least in countries like the UK where our government has in just over a decade all but destroyed our whole system. So now we’re left with a lower ratio of the humanitarian to the punitive in terms of outlook towards their patients.

But even more importantly doctors are more likely to be from sanctioned from above for actually doing whatever is necessary to treat patients and more likely to be promoted to positions of power and influence for taking a disciplinarian approach to patients.

Also both doctors and social workers and members of the judiciary face the threat that the mainstream and rightwing media will expose them for helping lower income or mad or both individuals to “waste public funds” tricking them into offering unwarranted treatments that harm children. This is a far worse prospect for them than the kind of exposure that they get for taking away disabled children or disabled people’s children, so it’s a straight forward self preservation calculation to lean the other way.


Then you add a pandemic that is causing an absolute avalanche of additional sickness that medical professionals are under pressure from above to deny and disappear. That they seem so ready to go along with this is a disappointment I can’t deny, but from the perspective of all the existing conditions I guess they were primed to go one way on this. The wrong way.


When I am dead and gone and people are referring to this period of extreme denial over the cause and effects of letting a novel virus freely circulate and just pretending the previously well recorded damage to every possible human organ isn’t happening and that people who it happens must be mad to feel the brunt of a political decision to put them at risk, of biological reality, as an example of human nature and frailties, I am gonna come back and haunt them because that is not what this is.




 
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“The consultant started saying that because I’m already in a wheelchair ‘maybe [she] wants to be disabled like her mum.’”
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What's especially absurd about this is how incredibly rare such a thing is. The odds of a MD seeing this once in their career is probably 1:1000. And yet even though it's excessively rare, it's often thought about.

Meanwhile chronic illnesses like us are a few % of the population, far more common, and yet it's explicitly dismissed as rare, far too often preferring a cause that is probably something like 1000x less likely. There are thousands of accounts of patients who were told this explicitly: X is very rare so you probably don't have it, clearly not understanding how probabilities work, and how there are many relatively rare conditions, which add up to, well, far more likely than the absurd notion of a child not just wanting to be disabled, but out of simple mimicry because their mother is.

Any rational person is able to understand that it's literally the opposite, that children see their parent's suffering and badly do not want it for their parent, let alone for themselves. It's so absurd to think this, even more absurd than what they are suggesting.

Like most things in medicine, it seems like the old trope of hooves and horses vs zebras is highly selective, not the least of which is that there are many places in the world where zebras are common and horses don't live, and many others where neither do.

And because this isn't absurd enough, even though it still happens, it's considered a war crime to refuse pain relief to enemy combatants who are held captive, because it is effectively torture. But it's a common medical practice.
 
Not directly about FII or ME/CFS but demonstrates the 'wider landscape' around these sort of issues.

Schools in England send police to homes of absent pupils with threats to jail their parents

Some schools in England are sending police to the homes of children who are persistently absent, or warning them their parents may go to prison if their attendance doesn’t improve, the Observer has learned.

Headteachers say they are now under intense pressure from the government to turn around the crisis in attendance, with a record 150,000 children at state schools classed as severely absent in 2022-23. From September, all state schools in England will have to share their attendance records every day with the Department for Education.

But child psychologists and parent groups are warning that the push for full attendance is driving “heavy-handed” crackdowns at some schools, and ignores the issues that often lie behind school refusal, including mental health problems, unmet special educational needs, bereavement or the child being a carer.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/article/2024/may/19/schools-england-police-homes-absent-pupils
 
Grauniad said:
But child psychologists and parent groups are warning that the push for full attendance is driving “heavy-handed” crackdowns at some schools, and ignores the issues that often lie behind school refusal, including mental health problems, unmet special educational needs, bereavement or the child being a carer.
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Continuing the total cover-up of Long Covid, zero mention of what is known to be the main cause of school absence. The fact that it's known, that the questions are asked and have been published publicly, easily available, makes it so disturbing. This is 1984 level of inventing a version of reality.

If the people saying this were asked pointed questions that don't allow them to deflect, they would admit that they know that illness is the main reason, and that since it directly follows the pandemic and has been reflected in many population surveys, they are well aware that this is the main reason, and that increasing attendance while maintaining high reinfection rates are mutually contradictory.

And still they'll just lie about it. Like good foot soldiers who are just following orders. Peacetime health care is basically starting to look like wartime national security, but even more disturbingly: even though the data that show otherwise is public and easily accessible.
 
Sean said:
A spokesperson for the Department for Education said: “We know some children face greater barriers to attendance, like pupils with long-term medical conditions or special educational needs and disabilities.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/article/2024/may/19/schools-england-police-homes-absent-pupils

I notice physical health problems are not on that list.
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I had almost an entire term off school when I was 13 because of a physical health problem, and my parents didn't get into trouble at all. It's amazing how often I say "thank God I'm old" these days, because being young is such a shit show for the young.
 
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