Stephen Hawking’s children are seeking the second police investigation in four years based on fears he is being abused recurrently by 53-year old second wife Elaine, his former nurse (and previously married to the man who made him his renowned voice synthesizing machinery) for whom he left his first wife, mother of his children, in 1990. The 62-year old Hawking has periodically presented to the emergency ward of his local hospital with mysterious injuries about which he refuses to elaborate and has threatened police investigating such concerns with harassment suits. Last summer, someone left Hawking stranded in his wheelchair in his garden on the hottest day of the year. He suffered heatstroke and sunburn at that time. He is now hospitalized with an unrelated pneumonia but reportedly shows evidence of fresh bruising. Police are waiting to interview him. His children and his adoring private duty nurses suggest his injuries may represent ‘Munchausen’s by proxy’, a psychiatric condition in which someone induces medical problems in another to draw attention and sympathy to themselves. —Mirror.co.uk

Those diagnosed with Munchausen’s by proxy are generally reviled for harming those dependent upon them. often their children, for twisted needs; I think of them as the ‘short eyes’ of the mental health field. The article notes that Hawking’s spurned first wife Jane ‘was left with a deep loathing of Elaine, who she describes as “manipulative” ‘. What is conspicuously missing from the article is any detail about Elaine’s comportment and what secondary gain she might derive from harming Hawking, if she is. In the absence of such detail, I am left wondering if the somewhat gratuitous mention of Munchausen’s is anything more than a disparaging epithet (which is certainly one of the ways we see psychiatric diagnoses bandied about in this society!) from a family with apparent enmity for her. If it is she who is harming him, it might more prosaically be considered a case of spousal abuse; Hawking’s offense at the investigations and insistence that his private life is his own affair are more consistent with the typical battered spouse syndrome than Munchausen’s by proxy, where the abuse is more subtle, simulates medical conditions rather than overt ‘torture’, and the victim is not aware that something is being done to them (if they really suspect Munchausen’s. for example, they should investigate whether the victimizer has in some subtle way induced the pneumonia rather than, more clumsily, bumps and bruises…). Sordid and tragic in either case. Of note, in my state of Massachusetts at least there exists a disabled person’s protection commission which is empowered to investigate allegations of abuse regardless of the victim’s wishes, in recognition of the often complicated allegiance the victim has to her/his abuser. In a better-safe-than-sorry manner, the threshold for involving the DPPC is quite low. Can British readers of FmH tell me if similar protections of disabled and dependent exist in the UK?