Structural Balance Property in the Dee Dee and Gypsy Blancharde Tragedy
The murder of Dee Dee Blancharde by her daughter Gypsy shocked everyone when news came out that the mother had a syndrome called Munchausen by proxy and was purposely making her daughter sick. Dee Dee made it appear that Gypsy had defective chromosomes, sleep apnea, epilepsy, brain damage, and cancer, implied from her shaved head. The mother shared false information to her daughter’s medical providers and was successful to the point where Gypsy was being given medications she was not supposed to take and were making her sick. She also underwent surgical operations on her eyes, ears, and salivary glands. Dee Dee’s sick actions were most likely for attention and for how well others were treating her, making use of charities to go to Disney World for free and living at Ronald McDonald houses.
I thought about how her mother was able to manipulate her daughter with this baffling number of chronic health conditions. Of course, Gypsy was especially vulnerable, because she was so young when this all started, and her mother was the perpetrator. However, I also think Dee Dee was able to put this front up for so long, because she used manipulation tactics that satisfied the structural balance property. The two moved away from Louisiana, where they and their family are originally from, but “escaped” because Dee Dee claimed her husband was an alcoholic and Gypsy’s grandfather was abusive. Unfortunately, Gypsy was born after her parents were separated, so she could not have known the real truth behind everything. She likely trusted her mother the most because she and her mother were nodes with positive relations to each other and mutual negative relations with Gypsy’s father and grandfather, which reinforced her positive tie to Dee Dee. Also, their friends and neighbors were sympathetic towards them and thought Dee Dee was a sweet mother caring for her sickly child. The triangle was once again stable, because there were positive relations among those people, Dee Dee, and Gypsy, which strengthened the positive ties between the mother and child.
However, just as how satisfying the structural balance property enabled Dee Dee to manipulate everyone around her, including her daughter, it also explains how everything fell apart and why Gypsy murdered her own mother. Gypsy met a guy named Nicholas Godejohn on a Christian dating website and began to question her mother’s controlling behavior and insistence on diagnosing her with conditions. Nicholas drove a wedge between the mother and daughter, all while reinforcing his positive relation to Gypsy. These two positive and one negative ties in a triangle led to Gypsy turning against her mother. Since all of this unfolded using manipulation tactics, I thought I would point out that the ties we define as positive or negative can be “positively” or “negatively deceptive”. Since three-way relationships tend to satisfy the structural balance property, all positive relations can quickly turn to two groups sharing a mutual enemy, which makes genuinely positive ties worth the time and effort because the odds can quickly turn against you.