BASW guidance
Updated: Dec 1, 2025
Guidance from the British Association of Social Workers, published May 2022
The Guide describes what is meant by the terms Fabricated or Induced Illness and Perplexing Presentations and the evidence (and more importantly, lack of evidence) for their suggested indictors.
It also challenges the notion that parents seeking the best for their child, are inadvertently harming them. This is a practical Guide which considers the ways in which Social Workers should remain open to a range of causes of disagreements when the difficulties experienced by a child or young person are not easily understood by medical practitioners or schools.
It appears that autistic parents and children, and those with multi-systemic conditions such as ME and Ehler's Danlos Syndrome, are especially susceptible to being thought to be fabricating or exaggerating symptoms, and so this is explicitly covered in this guidance.