Inside the pain and torture of a family ruined by Munchausen by Proxy disorder

Early 2009 was a difficult time for the Fort Worth, Texas-based Ybarra family. Hope Ybarra, a mother of three, had been fighting a rare form of bone cancer for eight years.Now, the cancer had reappeared after two remissions, and this time, she told her family, it would be fatal. Making this worse was that her youngest, 5-year-old Sophia, had been sick almost since birth with cystic fibrosis, generating a 15,000-page medical file.After hearing the news of Hope’s remission, Sophia put her arms around her.

“I’m going to miss you, Mommy,” she said.But according to Andrea Dunlop and Mike Weber’s new book, “The Mother Next Door: Medicine, Deception, and Munchausen by Proxy” (St.Martin’s Press, out Feb.

4), none of this was true.Ybarra wasn’t dying.She had never had cancer. And Sophia, who had spent her life being subjected to medical procedures including a surgically implanted feeding tube, had also never actually been sick.The form of abuse that causes a parent to subject her child to years of unnecessary medical intrusions is known as Munchausen syndrome by proxy.Dunlop, who hosts a podcast about the condition called “Nobody Should Believe Me,” emphasizes that Munchausen syndrome by proxy is defined by deliberate deception and “are not cases of someone who is simply anxious or even having outright delusions about illnesses.”In 2001, Ybarra, then a mother of two, was six months pregnant with twins when she told her husband, Fabian, that she had cancer.“Hope faced an agonizing decision,” Dunlop writes of the story Ybarra shared.“Her treatment could put the babies at risk, but if she forwent it, they could all die.

She went ahead with the radiation, and two weeks in, she was hit by another blow.She had lost the pregnancy.”Her family was devastated.“[Her sister] Robin remembers seeing ultrasound pictures of the twin girls, whom they had already named Alexandria and Alexia,” Dunlop writes.

“Robin would go on to name her son Alex...