Ugh... welcome to Fight Club?
More at the link: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/05/faking-cancer-online/588334/
Online, there are numerous groups and forums where people dealing with cancer can share their experiences.
(Stephany) Angelacos researched her disease and its treatments, and then, inspired by how knowledgeable everyone was, decided to found her own invite-only breast-cancer Facebook group that same year.
Today, this group has grown to 1,700 members.
The members comfort one another, organize fundraisers, and coordinate visits to those who are alone at the end of their lives. Angelacos, who has now completed active treatment, oversees many of these efforts.
Over the past year, one of the group's more active and popular members was Marissa Marchand. She quickly became close to many women in the group, and received an outpouring of sympathy, money, and gifts—including expensive wigs—to help defray the costs of medical care and raising her family.
Marchand's posts gradually became more extreme, the group's members say. She wrote that her son was being bullied over her diagnosis, and that her dog had been shot. Then, in December, according to Angelacos, Marchand announced that she was out of treatment options. Her cancer had spread to all of her major organs. She didn't have much time left to live. Soon, she stopped posting.
Around the time Marchand stopped posting in the Facebook group, she was arrested in Colorado for faking terminal cancer on the crowdfunding platform GoFundMe and accepting donations through multiple accounts. It seemed she had faked her illness to the Facebook group, too. At trial, she pleaded guilty and was sentenced to community service. "The entire group was devastated, angry, and in a state of disbelief,
As harrowing as the experience can be for those involved, people in online cancer support groups are routinely outed as healthy.
Among the internet's cancer communities, it's an often acknowledged problem, albeit still a shocking one. Among 10 people from three groups I spoke with recently, every person recalled someone being outed for faking in their communities at least once, if not more.
This condition of faking illness online has a name: "Munchausen by internet," or MBI. It's a form of factitious disorder, the mental disorder formerly known as Munchausen syndrome, in which people feign illness or actually make themselves sick for sympathy and attention. According to Marc Feldman, the psychiatrist at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa who coined the term MBI back in 2000, people with the condition are often motivated to lie by a need to control the reactions of others, particularly if they feel out of control in their own lives.
More at the link: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/05/faking-cancer-online/588334/
