Hi Javier,

If you are reading this, I am a mother if young man in his 30s.  My life was difficult, but no matter anything my son did  I love him more than anyone in the world.  I think your mother is probably grateful th as t she has had the opportunity to spend time with you despite the circumstances.

Dear Javier:

You started your thread more than a year ago, on May 8, 2021 with: “I’m shattered, heartbroken and I’ve failed miserably in life”

You shared a lot about your health in your original post and onward: “I’ve been diagnosed with Covid… My health has deteriorated immensely… Waking up to anxiety attacks, gasping for air and in full panic mode… I have panic attacks, I’m depressed all the time… My life is a disaster… the feeling of getting choked, the shivering, the sleep paralysis, the feeling of dying every morning have increased my Somniphobia… I’m struggling with burning lungs, exhaustion, fever, tiredness and fatigue, palpitation, brain fog, muscle pain, and chest pain… I want to cry, but I am empty of tears. I want to scream my lungs out to alleviate all my hurt and pain, but I have no voice left…

“struggling with my health. The only thing that diminished is the laryngospasm… I’m struggling with intense migraine and half my hair has fallen out… I’ve been struggling with my health… I’ve just came back from the hospital, as I got rashes all over my body. I experienced a high fever and my body was on fire. I was rushed to the hospital as my body was covered with vesticular rashes… According to my doctor, it’s COVID-related (May 17, 2021)… I’m still struggling with getting sleep at night. At the most I sleep 2 hours before I wake up all stressed out and hyperventilating…

“I called my neighbor and he is taking me to the Psych ward (May 21, 2021).. . They are doing a full check up and diagnostic scan of my entire body.. On Thursday, they will do a chemical imbalance check of the brain to determine if I have excessive or insufficient chemicals (neurotransmitters)”, June 1, 2021 –

– THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A “CHEMICAL IMBALANCE CHECK OF THE BRAIN”. THERE IS NO WAY TO MEASURE NEUROTRANSMITTERS IN THE BRAIN. The chemical imbalance theory is..  theory.

On June 6, 2021, you shared about the supposed results of the non-existing measurements of your neurotransmitters: “My Serotonin and Dopamine levels were really low, while Neuroepnipherine and Glutamate were off the chart…. I have Anemia and am at a high risk for Diabetes… I have inflamation in my liver”-

– In that post one can see that you inserted text from an online medical source.

August 2, 2021 and onward: “I’ve been back and forth at the hospital and the psych ward. I had a failed suicide attempt by drug overdose and have been under a high-risk surveillence… I have given up, I won’t make it. This is the end for me… I was laying on the floor, lost and defeated, with total emptiness, shattered into a thousand pieces…. “Due to my OD, I’m suffering from neurological complications and my left arm is paralyzed (January 2, 2022)… My nerves are damaged, hopefully I will be able to get 10%- 15% functionality… My mind is numb. Everything is black, no happiness, no relief, no smile, everything is and looks bleak (May 30, 2022).

very well mind. com, on Munchausen Syndrome, renamed Factitious Disorder Imposed on Self (FDIS): “Munchausen Syndrome is a mental disorder in which a person routinely acts as if they have a true physical or mental health issue even though they are not really sick. A person with this condition will deliberately create, complain of, or exaggerate symptoms of an illness that does not really exist… People with Munchausen Syndrome can be extremely manipulative since the main symptom of this disorder requires deception and dishonesty… personality disorders are common in people with Munchausen Syndrome.

“Treatment: Although people with Munchausen Syndrome may actively obtain treatment for the numerous disorders they create, they typically don’t want to admit to and seek treatment for the actual syndrome”.

anita

*Hopefully this will be a clean version of the above:

Dear Javier:

This post and the next are a result of hours of study. The reason I am posting this is because I hope that it will help you, if only a bit.

On Dec 4, 2021, almost 6 months ago, I submitted a post to you about chronic emptiness based on what you shared May- Dec 4, 2021: “I’m depressed all the time, and feel empty and lost… I feel isolated and cut off from the rest of the world… I’m empty, completely empty inside… I’m dead inside and completely empty… The emptiness will never disappear or go away, which I know that for sure…  I’ve always felt empty… I felt empty when I was 6, in my teens, in my 20s-30s and 40s. And I’m afraid I’ll be feeling this way until my last breath… (a) profound vacuum inside… I have struggled with this intense, chronic emptiness since I was a kid. It feels more and more like depression is a symptom of emptiness”.

In my Dec 4 post, I quoted from a couple of studies on chronic emptiness and borderline personality disorder (you wrote on May 20, 2021: “I am afraid I have… severe personality disorder”). In one of the studies, it said that bpd participants in the study distinguished between chronic emptiness and depression, experiencing the two differently, as two related, but separate experiences. This is congruent with what you said (see the paragraph above): “depression is a symptom of emptiness“. You portrayed this chronic emptiness as something greater than depression, something that leads to depression.

Back to the studies: “Chronic feelings of emptiness were experienced as a feeling of disconnection from both self and others, and a sense of numbness and nothingness“. This fits with what you shared back in May 2021: “I feel isolated and cut off from the rest of the world”.

The way I see this chronic emptiness is that it is an extreme, intense lack of connection to others, which is devastating to a human and to any other highly social animal. It is tied to a disconnection with self: “I feel disconnected from… my feelings and my thoughts, and sometimes it feels like I am completely disconnected from my soul“, you wrote, and it is tied to a feeling of deadness, nothingness and numbness: “I am dead inside… the feeling of nothingness… utter numbness… the feeling of my mind is numb… I feel nothing“.

It is the extreme nature of the disconnection from others and within the self that leads to this feeling of chronic emptiness, an experience more intense than depression, or perhaps it can be said that this chronic emptiness is a more acute form of depression.

On May 12, 2021, you shared this about your childhood and your present feelings about it: “My father left us when I was 5 years old. I have only bad memories, as he was a firm believer in discipline. My siblings and I were physically punished by our ‘father’ every time we were guilty of some wrongdoing. I still remember I used to wet myself when I knew I was in for a beating… From (when) I was 6-7 years old till I was 16 years old, (mother) was in a relationship. My mother loved him, and she was genuinely happy. He was the love of her life… he was married and had kids. My mother was ‘the other’ woman and labeled as ‘homewrecker’. As time went by, and I got in my teens. I realized he will never leave his wife and kids. So, I started to act out, I was showing my ‘bad’ sides and stopped talking to my mother. Eventually, after some time, she had to choose, and she ended the relationship. It broke my mother into ‘thousand’ pieces. It killed her, and I haven’t seen her happy since. I hate myself for that… I took away my mother’s happiness and ‘killed’ her. I can see the pain in her eyes, I hate myself so much for ruining her life” –

– you put quotation marks around father (“father”) because you were not connected to him in any positive, intimate father-son way. But you were connected to your mother: she was the number 1 person in your life… only she had another person being her number 1. When this man was in her life- she was happy, when he was gone- she was extremely unhappy.

Before you were 5, you suffered in the hands of a violent father. A year after he left, you had TEN very long years of watching another man occupy your mother’s mind and heart. How lonely, how hurt and angry does it make a boy feel? And as the boy matures and enters puberty, knowing that his mother is having sex with this man in the same home where you lived… a man who occupied not only her mind and heart, but also her body… how did that feel, day in and day out, night after night, for what felt like eternity?

Instead of having a healthy childhood and adolescence life, focusing on your interests, your friends… your life was about your mother’s 10-years affair with a married man, a man with another wife and a family elsewhere, exposed to the drama of your mother’s affair: their conversations, their arguments, what other people said… that whole drama.

And all along, who sees and hears you: the hurt, the anger, the loneliness, the jealousy, the emotional torture of having this man being your mother’s number 1 while you went unnoticed, unseen, unheard? Who cared to see, hear… notice the drama in your own mind and heart?

I will continue in the next post.

anita

Dear Javier:

The word Factitious means False, Fake. Factitious Disorder Imposed on Self (FDIS)-  aka Munchausen Syndrome- is about these behaviors: (1) presenting False information to medical doctors, other health care professionals, family, friends, members in support groups for various illnesses.. and to members reading your thread right here, (2)  presenting false information knowingly and intentionally, aka lying,  (3) doing so not for practical or financial motivations, but for reasons not clear to the person who feels compelled to do what he/ she does.

There are two factitious disorders: FDIS and Factitious Disorder Imposed on Other (FDIO)- aka Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (the Other is a person’s child or other dependent). The #1-3 I listed above are true to both disorders.

A person fitting the FDIS diagnosis does the following: 1) Exaggerate their symptoms, 2) Make up symptoms that do not exist, 3) Fake symptoms, ex., acting as if one is having a seizure, 4) Create symptoms by ingesting pills, injecting bacteria, milk, gasoline, fecal matter, etc. into one’s blood, and/ or burn or cut oneself, 5) Tamper with medical instruments, ex., heating a thermometer so to show evidence of non-existing fever, 6) Contaminate medical specimens, ex., adding something to one’s urine sample before giving it to analysis, 7) Alter medical documents, ex., printing symptoms and diseases into a medical document.

A person fitting the FDIS diagnosis seeks medical attention from various doctors and medical facilities, resulting in multiple diagnostic tests, procedures, treatments and hospitalizations. Again, not for a practical or financial motive such as acquiring false evidence for a false lawsuit, but because a person is compelled to do what he/ she does.

The American DSM-4 presented three kinds of FDIS: one where a person complains primarily about physical symptoms, a second where the complaints are primarily about psychological symptoms, and a third was about both kinds of symptoms. The current DSM-5 corrected the topic of symptoms, stating that to be diagnosed with FDIS, the symptoms the person complains about need to be primarily physical. The World Health Organization’s ICD-10 does not differentiate between FDIS symptoms the person complains about,  “either physical or psychological”, it states.

You, Javier, presented many physical and many psychological symptoms on your thread (internet). I don’t know if your FDIS is limited to the internet or if it is true to your real-life as well. I suspect the latter because what you shared over the months fits very well to what I read about FDIS, including, but not limited to “extensive knowledge of .. medical terminology, as well as the textbook descriptions of illnesses” (Cleveland clinic. org), but there is no way for me to know for sure.

Cleveland clinic. org: “What is Munchausen Syndrome by Internet?… If you have Munchausen Syndrome by internet, you might do the following: * Say you have symptoms that are far more severe than anyone else’s,  * Claim to have nearly died and had a miraculous recovery, * Paste information copied from a health website into your posts, * Contradict yourself, * Lie about what hospital you attend, what medicines you take, etc. * Claim to have something dramatic going on in your life, repeatedly”.

The damage a person fitting a factitious disorder creates is not only to themselves (reporting exaggerated or false symptoms to doctors and therefore receiving harmful treatments and going through unnecessary dangerous procedures, ingesting and injecting harmful substances, etc.,  but also to (1) medical doctors who are manipulated to harm patients (going against their “First do no harm” oath) and who therefore risk malpractice lawsuits, (2)  people whose participation in a support group for a particular illness is valid, find out that a trusted member was there lying all along, feeling betrayed and used as a result, (3) members reading this very thread, members who empathetically responded to you ending up feeling manipulated and used.

Your repeated thank-you-s and expressions of appreciation to responding members were manipulative, aimed at keeping members motivated to keep being the audience to your lies. I knew for sure that you were manipulative ever since you reported having had a medical test (and results of a test) that does not exist, but I replied to you further, here and there, because I knew then and I know now that you are truly suffering, only not from what you falsely reported to be suffering from.

I think that you went through years of being unseen, unheard-  for way too long. It created an intense thirst to be  seen and heard, and you stumbled upon a way to do it: FDIS aka Munchausen Syndrome on-the-internet, and likely, I think- in real life. I want to encourage you somehow to find a different way to be seen and heard (or read, when it comes to the internet): share only about your true hurts and pains, loneliness and despair, you will make yourself believable this way. Plus, your true hurts and pains do not need to be magnified into failed internal organs, physical paralysis, etc.: hey are significant enough as they truly are.

anita