Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T08:19:15.293Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Child Stealing and Pseudocyesis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

P. T. d'Orbán
P. T. d'Orbán*
Affiliation:
Royal Free Hospital, Pond Street, London NW3 2QG
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Describing the occurrence of pseudocyesis and its treatment in a 15-year-old girl, Hardwick and Fitzpatrick (1981) pose the question whether there is any association between pseudocyesis and child stealing. They comment that such an association has not so far been reported. However, cases of presumed pseudocyesis have previously been noted among child stealers (d'Orbán, 1972; 1976; 1981) (based on patients' accounts which could not be verified) and three characteristic offence patterns were described:

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 141 , Issue 2 , August 1982 , pp. 196 - 198
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1982 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

d'Orbán, P. T. (1972) Baby stealing. British Medical Journal, 2, 635–39.Google Scholar
d'Orbán, P. T. (1976) Child stealing: A typology of female offenders. British Journal of Criminology, 16, 275–81.Google Scholar
d'Orbán, P. T. (1981) Baby stealing: Motives and punishment The Police Surgeon, 19, 74–80.Google Scholar
Fried, P. H., Rakoff, A. E., Schopbach, R. R. & Kaplan, A. J. (1951) Pseudocyesis: A psychosomatic study in gynaecology. Journal of the American Medical Association, 145, 1329–35.Google Scholar
Hardwick, P. J. & Fitzpatrick, C. (1981) Fear, folie and phantom pregnancy: Pseudocyesis in a fifteen-year-old girl. British Journal of Psychiatry, 139, 558–62.Google Scholar
Kerr, M. (1963) Personality and Conflict in Jamaica, p. 64. London: Collins Google Scholar
Weinstein, E. A. (1962) Cultural Aspects of Delusion, p. 104. New York: Glencoe Google Scholar
Submit a response

eLetters

No eLetters have been published for this article.