Word: munchausen
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...work made Ted a nice living, and allowed him a surprising creative latitude, but toward the end of the 30s he was itching to expand. He wrote his first book for kids: "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street," the story of a baby von Munchausen who devises whoppers as he strolls home. His big early success was with "Horton Hatches the Egg," the 1940 parable of an elephant who sits on a bird's egg for 51 weeks until, when the chick hatches, it has four legs and a trunk - an elephant bird. ("Horton" was made...
Meadow coined the term Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy (MSBP) in a 1977 Lancet article to describe the behavior of "parents who, by falsification, caused their children innumerable harmful hospital procedures." (Patients with Munchausen Syndrome, named for a fictional character known for tall tales, fake their own symptoms.) In the U.K. and elsewhere, MSBP has become an increasingly common diagnosis, as medical and law- enforcement professionals became familiar with the catalog of MSBP indicators. The FBI profile of the typical perpetrator, for example, warns that they "are most often biological mothers of the victims ... welcome medical tests that are painful...
...with a paradoxical, occasionally self-destructive desire to make what are essentially art movies on huge budgets. Sometimes the results are entrancing (Time Bandits, The Fisher King). Sometimes they are disastrous (Brazil involved him in a famously acrimonious final-cut fight with the studio; The Adventures of Baron Munchausen went insanely over budget). You never know what you will get when he sets forth on one of his excellent adventures...
...family physician once described Noe as "an unstable schizophrenic personality." Her behavior reflects some characteristics of "Munchausen syndrome by proxy," a disorder in which a person induces or fakes medical problems in another in order to gain attention and sympathy. Friends say Noe used to "love attention"; in fact, she told detectives that she secretly hoped to be caught. Psychiatrists may find that she acted in a dissociative state, unaware of her actions and unable to recall what she'd done...
...look at Jewell, because the person who reports a crime is almost always investigated. More specifically, they remembered an incident at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles in which the cop who "found" a bomb on a bus for Turkish athletes turned out to have planted it. This "modified Munchausen syndrome," in FBI terminology, occurs in someone who wants to be a hero so badly that he creates emergencies so he can rescue people. Jewell, a police wannabe, fit this profile and also had the characteristics of people who use pipe bombs--white single men in their...