The website's explanation begins with a warning to those reading who feel they may be the victim of the illness. Because vulnerable people are the victims, MSBP is a form of child abuse or elder abuse,' according to the University of Michigan Medicine website. So what, exactly, is the illness? Munchausen syndrome by proxy is 'a mental health problem in which a caregiver makes up or causes an illness or injury in a person under his or her care, such as a child, an elderly adult, or a person who has a disability. The Act is true story, even though in Hulu's adaptation, actors take on the dramatization of what was once reality. In 2018, it took center stage in HBO special Sharp Objects, based on the book of the same name by Gillian Flynn. Munchausen syndrome by proxy, while a fairly rare illness, has begun to creep its way into fictionalized stories. The series explores Blanchard's Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a mental illness that encouraged her to keep her only daughter, Gypsy, sick through childhood and into early adulthood.

Though Gypsy Rose Blanchard may not have been truly sick, her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard, was.

Hulu's latest original series, The Act, focuses on the perception of illness.