Andrea Dunlop

It's not something that people are going to self-report.

Survivors may self-report later.

There's one long-term study by my colleague, Dr. Kathy Ayoub, who's been following a number of adult survivors for a long time, but she has not compiled or released that data yet.

So I think we may get a better picture as there is more public awareness of it.

Part of the problem in a lot of abuse statistics, because we don't necessarily catch it, doesn't necessarily end up in CPS database or criminal database, child abuse on the whole, not something that is highly prosecuted.

Most people, unfortunately, just get away with it.

And a lot of the data that we have on child abuse as a whole is collected from adult survivors.

The barrier to that with Munchausen by proxy abuse is many adult survivors, first of all, don't know who to tell once they realize they are abuse survivors and may not realize until they're in their 20s or 30s or beyond that they even were abuse survivors.

They know there was something going on.

They know there was something wrong with their childhood.

But the process of discovery can be quite onerous for survivors.

Yeah, it does.

And I think, unfortunately, that public perception is doubled down on by a lot of media outlets and the coverage of the Maya Kowalski case.

They mentioned in that context, oh, well, it can't be this because this is so rare.

Meanwhile, the mother is claiming in that case that her child has whole body CRPS, which is not a condition that exists.

CRPS does exist.

She was told by three world class hospitals that her child did not have that, that her child had conversion disorder.

And she kept looking for this diagnosis of CRPS until she found a doctor with a all cash ketamine clinic who did give her that diagnosis and prescribed all of these ketamine infusions for her daughter's.

If we're talking about probabilities here, it doesn't matter.

Like, even if you think Munchausen by proxy is pretty rare, this is such an obvious case of it.