I'll be very grateful to anyone who can tell me what this word is, as I've been trying to figure it out for over a year now.
It is the name of a syndrome where a mother keeps her children sickly and malnourished because she relishes the attention she gets from well-wishers.
The lady towards the end of the movie Sixth Sense (the one that kills her daughter by poisoning her soup and is unmasked when the daughter's ghost tells the little boy about it) has this syndrome.

I'm pretty sure the name of the syndrome is German. The recent A Word A Day email "Munchausen Syndrome" reminded me of it.

thank you!
Cory
coryf@rocketmail.com
Please email me if you know it.

I had no clue as to the answer to this so I resorted to my usual search tricks with Google.com. what I found was that while Munchausen Syndrome is a child making himself sick to gain attention, when an individual makes another person sick in order to accrue the same gains--but this time vicariously--it is called Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.

weird...

>Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.

If any of you are into sort of gruesome mystery stories, Patricia Cornwell wrote one of her forensic medicine novels about Munchausen's by proxy. Yes, weird. We've had three or four cases of it here in Colorado in the last year or so. In one of them, a hospital suspected there was a problem with one of their child patients and put in a surveillance camera. They caught the mother holding a pillow over her own child's face and partially smothering her.

I first heard about this in a detective story by Jonathan Kellerman called "Devil's Waltz".

Bingley