Munchausen Syndrome looks like a possibility. It reminds me of a suspected case of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy at my high school where a sped student's mom dosed his son with sleeping pills during weekends to keep him from bothering her. Then during the week, he'd be sleepy in class and improve towards the end of the week, only to be dosed again. Alas, they didn't have enough evidence to do anything about it.
She also noticed that I had an interpreter, thought of her as a mere aide and forced the school to hire one for her son.
This is the Wikipedia
article that started my search on people like this. Here's the part on disabled people's views of this stuff:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Wikipedia
A widespread view by disabled people outside DPW circles is that the attraction results from low self-esteem. Lack of success in attracting able-bodied sexual partners on the part of such individuals may drive them to view disabled people as 'soft targets.'
DPW-aware disabled people generally adhere to the DPW community's explanations. In particular, they draw attention to the untenability and political incorrectness of the argument that denigrates them to the status of second-best partners for social inepts. They do, however, draw a very sharp distinction between 'sound' DPWs and "fetishists" who engage in borderline behaviour and objectify disability.
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The Borderline section is creepy.
Then after finding that article, I wondered if there were any deaf wannabes, so I googled that and found the blog of the deaf wannabe and pretender, which linked to the other blogs I described before.
I also found another article about someone who wants to become deaf
here. It says that the person has a poor sense of self and may be trying to use deafness as a way to build up one.
Another thing I saw on those transable sites is stuff about properly representing the people with the condition that they're pretending to have, apparently to get it right out of respect. I think if they want to show true respect to people with the conditions, they should do something to help them, like by donating to places that do that, instead of wasting resources like wheelchairs and hearing aids.
These people also claim to have
Body integrity identity disorder. The article uses it to mean people who want amputations to feel whole, but the other transable people seem to use BIID in a more general way. They're trying to make it look like a legitimate thing to be treated in the manner they want it to be, like by becoming deaf.
I'm deaf because of
this. If a transable person were to pretend to have or want to have this syndrome, I'd feel insulted because that syndrome can kill you and my elder brother died because of it. It cheapens it because they won't really have it and if they get tired of it, they can just stop pretending, which I can't do because it's encoded into my genes.