Playing the partWhat Hope did goes by several names, the most common being Munchausen syndrome by proxy or medical child abuse. "It's not a psychiatric disorder," said Dr. Jayme Coffman , a child abuse pediatrician at Cook Children's Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas. Hope, who pled guilty to charges of child abuse, had three children with her ex-husband. How it gets reported varies from place to place, and some cases are lumped in with other forms of child abuse, according to Maxine Eichner , a law professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has researched medical child abuse from a legal perspective. Eichner has written about how she believes the diagnosis of medical child abuse may mistake some parents of medically complex children for abusive parents.

Source: CNN August 15, 2017 09:11 UTC