Just a reminder: Parents, do NOT pretend that your kid has a life-threatening illness so that sympathetic do-gooders will send you megabucks and then you can buy a bunch of jet-skis. Or any personal watercraft. Don’t do that. Please?
An Ohio mom allegedly shaved her 4-year-old son JJ’s head to make people—and, even more horribly, JJ himself—think that he was dying of terminal brain cancer. The woman, Emily Creno-King, 31, also had her estranged husband give JJ unnecessary medicine during his weekend visits.
She forced him to wear a surgical mask and set up Facebook groups to ask kind-hearted strangers to chip in for his treatment, it’s claimed.
…”There was always a doubt in my mind,” [JJ’s father] John Creno told NBC4.
“But once all the medicines started coming with him on weekends, I thought, ‘Ok, he really does have it,'” he added.
Creno-King is being held on $50,000 bond and is being evaluated by mental health professionals to determine whether she has Münchausen syndrome by proxy or is simply an asshole. That distinction is controversial, making cases like this something of a minefield to discuss—there’s no clear consensus as to whether Münchausen by proxy can really be called a mental disorder, or if it’s just a pattern of abuse. I don’t want to downplay mental illness any more than I want to apologize for exploitative abusers. The same stumbling block applies in all intersections of mental health and criminal justice. (In my completely non-professional opinion, putting your child’s life in danger for callous financial reasons seems a tad beyond the scope of typical mental health. But what do I know—I’m just some lady.)
Creno-King’s case is just the latest in a number of similar incidents over the past few years—a pattern that, I imagine, must be amplified by the crowdfunding power of the internet.