In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Last night, my wife and I watched a true crime show on the Lacey Spears case , in which Spears, a single mother desperate for attention, wildly overshared on social media about her son Garnett's health struggles. Garnett passed away at the age of 5 from high levels of sodium leading to swelling in his brain. On March 2, 2015, a jury found Spears guilty of murdering her son by poisoning him with table salt, which she had administered to him from infancy through his feeding tube. The case has become a well-known example of Munchausen by proxy : Munchausen syndrome by proxy is a mental illness and a form of child abuse. The caretaker of a child, most often a mother, either makes up fake symptoms or causes real symptoms to make it look like the child is sick. Most discussions attribute its motivation to attention-seeking by the mother, but in another case, the Dee Dee Blancard murder , the mother exploited her daughter's putative handicaps and disabilities to live entire...