A short story I saw in a magazine when I was in England.
A mentally unstable mother accidentally inflicts a severe injury on her own child. She blames herself immensely—in a pathological way, really—while those around her try to encourage her, saying, "Anyone can be careless. At least the child's life was saved, and you need to stay strong as a mother."
At that point, the mother undergoes a twisted mental conversion: "When something terrible happens to my child, everyone sympathizes with me. They're kind to me, pay attention to me, notice me, and I'm not lonely."
Driven by this logic, she begins intentionally injuring her child and plotting to make them sick. Yet, despite her mental illness, she is strangely clever and meticulous. Catching her child as they are about to fall off a swing, she thinks: "I just caused an injury recently, so if something happens again so soon, people will get suspicious. Honestly, this kid should have just fallen a little later. That would have saved me the trouble." She was completely out of her mind.
In the end, her first child is killed. But because the people around her only saw her as, "A poor mother who took care of her child so devotedly...", her illness levels up even further. She learns that the death of her child equals the maximum amount of sympathy for herself, and she sets out to kill her next child. What's more, she even gets pregnant again in preparation for when the next child dies.
The excerpt I was reading ended right as the next child runs to a school teacher (or somewhere similar) to cry for help, saying, "I'm going to be killed!" And at the very end, there was a note saying, "Based on a true story."
I had heard that such a mental disorder existed before, but reading about it like that...
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That's Munchausen syndrome by proxy. If you google it, a ton of stuff comes up.
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Yes, exactly, that's it. If I recall correctly, the mother of the ghost girl in *The Sixth Sense* was like that too. In that movie, the mother would scratch the little girl and then make her play in a muddy sandbox after it rained to try and give her tetanus. And then she'd say, "It ironically proved that vaccinations are effective."
Since it was an English novel, there were many parts I couldn't fully understand, and I forgot the title and author. It was a thin, B5-sized paperback with a color cover. It was half fiction and half articles—in Japanese terms, it was kind of like AERA mixed with Orange Page.
If anyone happens to know how the story continues, I'd love to know... though that's probably impossible.
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