\n<\/p>\n
T<\/span>here\u2019s an increasingly common pattern emerging whereby documentary makers take a story that was run through the Outrage-A-Tron by the tabloids to produce headlines that warped public understanding (\u201cBritain\u2019s Worst\/Most Evil\/Most Deadly\u201d and so on), then proceed to put back some of the lost nuance and present the more complicated original picture. Lucy Letby (\u201cBritain\u2019s Worst Child Killer\u201d) has been the subject of at least two such films redressing the lost balance. Last week, the story of Rhianan Rudd (\u201cBritain\u2019s Youngest Terrorist\u201d) was unpacked and its many sadder parts laid out for inspection in The Schoolgirl Terrorist?<\/p>\n In Love You to Death, it is the turn of Lisa Hayden-Johnson, who became known as \u201cBritain\u2019s Most Evil Mum\u201d during her trial and conviction for child cruelty <\/strong>after years spent fabricating her son Matthew\u2019s apparent illnesses. He was put through more than 300 medical encounters, nine general anaesthetics, four operations by the age of nine, and endured many unnecessary constraints on his life, including using a wheelchair, feeding tube and oxygen tank, until Lisa was arrested when he was nine.<\/p>\n Love You to Death interviews Lisa, Matthew and his older sister Laura \u2013 who has some memories of being \u201ca trial run\u201d for her mother\u2019s fabrications but whose suffering is largely of the more indirect, but no less damaging, kind that comes with living in a household that revolves around an ill and disabled member, taking on caring responsibilities very young, then finding out that all of it existed only to serve another\u2019s incomprehensible purposes.<\/p>\n The documentary lays out the chronology first, from Matthew\u2019s seven-week premature birth in 2001, through his early stays in hospital as Lisa insisted he was failing to thrive because he was allergic to so many foods. It goes on through his apparently accumulating conditions, his local fame as \u201cthe boy in the buggy\u201d whom the community rallied to help, and Lisa\u2019s insistence to their main clinician Dr Broomhall \u2013 not interviewed, though their local GP Dr Paul Johnson is \u2013 that Matthew be referred to Great Ormond Street for more thorough investigations. This was despite Broomhall\u2019s reluctance and the increasing suspicions among ward staff that all was not well.<\/p>\n <\/span>Lisa and Matthew at the Children of Courage Awards 2005.<\/span> Photograph: PA Images\/Alamy<\/p>\n Eventually Dr Stella Imong, who had many dealings with Matthew\u2019s \u201cquite demanding\u201d mother on the ward and had noticed the increasing number of factors in his notes that weren\u2019t quite tallying, confronted Dr Broomhall about the situation and the latter reported Lisa to the police. The working presumption was that Lisa was suffering from Munchausen\u2019s syndrome by proxy (now known as fabricated or induced illness) and enjoying the attention gained by having a sick child.<\/p>\n It is a glaring weakness of the programme that it does not probe further into the whys and wherefores of the medical establishment\u2019s inertia here. Especially as GP Paul Johnson all but shuffles his feet in embarrassment as he describes how confrontation \u201cbefore you\u2019re sure\u201d can damage doctors\u2019 reputations and hurt anyone falsely accused of harming their child. There is also mention of nurses raising concerns much earlier than any were acted upon, and any astute viewer will surely have more questions than are answered. A film about medical ethics, arrogance, cowardice and self-protection could easily work here.<\/p>\n But the emphasis is on Lisa and her enduring insistence \u2013 bar the occasional slight concessions \u2013 that she did nothing wrong. Matthew was ill, she says, and everything she did was to help him. The children have no contact with her now, which clearly upsets her, but there is no sign that she is willing \u2013 or perhaps able \u2013 to provide them with the acceptance of her condition and what she really did that they need to establish any kind of rapprochement. Another weakness is the lack of anything other than softball questions to Lisa. She is rarely pressed on any issue or incident and it feels like a dereliction of journalistic duty.<\/p>\n Laura and Matthew talk about her with regret, mystification and \u2013 particularly in Laura\u2019s case \u2013 a longing for her to accept responsibility for their suffering. They are a study in grace and compassion. They manage to see her as mentally ill rather than \u201cevil\u201d, despite their experience of life lived right on the border between those two states. They undoubtedly deserve better \u2013 from their mother, from the professionals involved with their childhoods, and this programme, which \u2013 though it valuably restores much of what the tabloids eschewed \u2013 fails on some of its own quite vital terms.<\/p>\n Love You to Death is on Channel 4 now<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There\u2019s an increasingly common pattern emerging whereby documentary makers take a story that was run through the Outrage-A-Tron by the tabloids to produce headlines that warped public understanding (\u201cBritain\u2019s Worst\/Most Evil\/Most Deadly\u201d and so on), then proceed to put back some of the lost nuance and present the more complicated original picture. Lucy Letby (\u201cBritain\u2019s<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":51858,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[878,376,25185,12433,1253,5593,1085,9926,1779,668],"class_list":{"0":"post-51857","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-asked","9":"tag-death","10":"tag-faked","11":"tag-illnesses","12":"tag-love","13":"tag-radio","14":"tag-review","15":"tag-sons","16":"tag-television","17":"tag-woman"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51857"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51857\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/51858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}