From fewer than 100 cases of MULTIPLE PERSONALITY SYNDROME ever diagnosed throughout human history to literally tens of thousands of people labelled with the condition in the years that followed the 1973 release of the blockbuster book SYBIL, MPD, for a while, became a cultural phenomena and changed the course of psychiatric history.
That was until the pushback that gave a voice to the doubters and skeptics whose voices up until that time had been muffled and silenced. That’s what’s examined in this, the final part of the series.
By the early 1990’s MULTIPLE PERSONALITY DISORDER and the false memory epidemic it had spawned were beginning to lose respectability.
1992 was the founding year for the FALSE MEMORY SYNDROME FOUNDATION (FMSF) in the United States. In 1994, the American Psychiatric Association renamed the ‘condition’ DISSASOCIATIVE IDENTITY DISORDER (D.I.D) – a move designed to make it less alluring to the public.
In that same year the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual suggested that D.I.D might be “overdiagnosed in individuals who are highly suggestible” and warned about “overzealous therapists” promoting dissosociation rather than curing it.
By the mid 1990’s, therapists were being sued by patients for misdiagnosing MPD in order to generate huge billings and defraud insurance companies.
One woman from Iowa, with the ‘help’ of her psychiatrist, had remembered having sex with President John F. Kennedy. She was seven years old when Kennedy was assasinated.
Therapists were advised to stop glorifying alters and to treat patients as whole persons rather than a collection of selves. Talk show host GERALDORIVERA officially apologized to viewers for all those years of fueling the MPD epidemic by bringing multiples and therapists on his prime time program.
A 2009 edition of the 1973 book that launched a psychiatric fad that was to last fully two decades was published with a three page advisory for readers. It warned that questions exist about Shirley Mason‘s (the real-life ‘Sybil’) diagnosis and the truthfulness of her life story.
So how best, all these years later, to make sense of the psychiatric trend that swept across America and other western countries and became nothing short of a part of the cultural wallpaper?
The answer to that question comes beautifully expressed from Debbie Nathan, author of the 2011 book SYBIL EXPOSED –
“People in modern western cultures have been encouraged and socialized to nurture complex selves, rich interior lives and individual experiences. MULTIPLE PERSONALITY SYNDROME for a time was the perfect, prefabricated ‘patsy’ and psychic container for people’s troubles.”
Like in so many areas, the credibility of things that ARE genuine is often weakened and made more difficult to believe by the presence of half-truths, exaggerations, imposters and frauds. It can be hard to tell the difference. The cases depicted in these clips appear to show genuine cases of MULTIPLE PERSONALITY SYNDROME –
When the book SYBIL was published in 1973, fewer than 200 people worldwide had ever been diagnosed with what would come to be known as Multiple Personality Syndrome.
By 1980 – a mere seven years later – Multiple Personality Syndrome would earn its official stamp of approval and be listed for the first time by the American Medical Association as a recognised psychiatric condition.
Soon mental health professionals would be diagnosing thousands of cases a year.
Still in print today, the book and a 1976 made for tv movie (aired over 2 consecutive nights in November of that year and watched by one fifth of the then American population) became a cultural phenomena and briefly chganged the course of psychiatric history.
According to Debbie Nathan however, author of the 2011 book SYBIL EXPOSED, the claims of multiple personality existing within the real-life person SYBIL was based on, a young woman named Shirley Mason (1923 – 1998), were fabrications, created largely by therapist suggestion and encouraged to take hold by Shirley’s psychiatrist Dr Connie Wilbur.
These fabrications, exaggerations and false memories were then packaged together to make a sellable story by writer Flora Schreiber (1918 – 1988) author of the 1973 bestseller (sales in excess of six million copies) SYBIL.
Together the three woman – patient Shirley – psychiatrist Dr Wilbur – and journalist Flora Schreiber – according to investigative writer Debbie Nathan – formed an unholy sisterhood to manufacture and market a fresh face for ‘mental illness’ the 1970’s public could not look away from and which became a cashcow on the most monumental of scales – one that kept on giving right up until the 1990’s.
Multiple Personality Syndrome became a dangerous fad. By the early 1990’s there were thousands of people, in every sizeable community in the United States and Canada in treatment for MPD.
‘Memoirs’ written by ‘multiples’ began appearing in bookstores –
There were SYBIL t-shirts, SYBIL dolls, SYBIL the Musical and SYBIL board games. Magazines like MANY VOICES to which multiples could contribute poems and artwork appeared.
The movie and book became so iconic, the educational publisher SCHOLASTIC even developed a SYBIL lesson plan for use in High Schools.
Teenagers were instructed to “Write a discussion in dialogue form between two or more sides of your personality. Name them as Sybil named hers. Try to indicate why you are more ‘together’ than Sybil”.
Talk show queen Oprah Winfrey devoted numerous shows to the MPD phenomena.
Courts even began admitting testimony from people’s ‘alters’ and celebrities like Roseanne Barr jumped on board claiming to have multiple personalities.
For a while, near on two decades infact, the Multiple Personality Disorder ‘industry’, if you could call it that, went literally ‘gangbusters’; gathering steam and credibility as thousands of psycho-therapists signed up to diagnose tens of thousands of patients and literally millions of words were devoted to discussing psychiatry’s ‘next big thing’ .
That was until the big pushback against MPD. Eventually the floodgates would open and skeptics worldwide would gain a voice.
When that happened, MPD’s days as the ‘in vogue’ mental illness Hollywood had found so easy to dramatise and unwittingly glamorise, were numbered.
Miss the first three installments? You can find them HERE – HERE – and HERE
SHIRLEY MASON (1923 – 1998) was the real name of the American woman the world would come to know as SYBIL.
She underwent 11 years of psychotherapy sessions – beginning in 1954 when she was aged 31 – with her psychiatrist Dr Connie Wilbur (1908 – 1992).
The doctor/patient relationship that developed between Shirley and her psychiatrist over the eleven years of their sessions together was one like no other.
Dr Connie Wilbur treated her patient night and day, on weekends and weekdays; inside her office and outside, making house calls and even taking Shirley with her to social events and vacations.
Dr Wilbur fed Shirley, gave her money and paid her rent. She acted as an art broker to sell Shirley’s many paintings.
Shirley took to staying overnight at her psychiatrist’s house – enjoying what is humourously described in the book SYBIL EXPOSED as ‘Freudian slumber parties’.
The two women developed a slavish dependency upon each other. Towards the end of their lives they ended up living together.
Ethics rules were not so clearly codified for psychiatrists back in the 1950’s and early ’60’s when Dr Wilbur was treating Shirley.
Even so, the self-described ‘maverick‘ Dr Wilbur – whose clients included Hollywood types such as Roddy ‘Planet of the Apes’ McDowell – most likely would have been disciplined if her colleagues had known she was giving a patient free treatment, clothes, a house pet, rent money and even furnishings from the apartment where the patient’s analysis was taking place.
The psychiatry community would also have been shocked to know that part of Dr Wibur’s treatment of Shirley involved having the patient work for her.
The job involved secretarial duties, dog walking and care for a family member. To do this work Shirley went into Dr Wibur’s house at all hours, unannounced – she even had her own key.
Shirley often spent whole days in her doctor’s orbit. Mornings she walked the dogs. Early afternoon she went to libraries to do psychiatry research for Dr Wilbur.
Later she would return to her psychiatrist’s apartment to walk the dogs again. Then she’d have a psychoanalysis session that freqently would last for two to three hours. It would be nighttime before she got back to her own apartment.
SHIRLEY MASON (1923 – 1998) was the real name of the woman who the world would come to know as SYBIL, back in the 1970’s.
Shirley was brought up as an only child in rural Minnessota in the United States. Her parents were strict Seventh Day Adventists – a religion that banned novels and short stories that young Shirley loved to read and write.
It’s alleged Shirley was assaulted and punished in the most cruel and horrific ways as a child and that her personality underwent a ‘psychic splitting’ as a result.
‘Pyschic Splitting’ – or Multiple Personality Syndrome (now known as Dissasociative Personality Syndrome) – can be explained as a coping mechanism that allows seperate personalities to develop in an attempt to share the burden of trauma among seperate ‘identities’.
As a young woman, Shirley Mason found herself confronting emotional instability. She sought psychiatric help and eventually linked up with Dr Connie Wibur (1908 – 1992) who practised in New York.
Shirley would go on to have no less than 11 years of pschotherapy sessions with Dr Wibur, beginning in 1954, and develop the most extraordinary patient-therapist relationship.
What the book SYBIL EXPOSED points out is that prior to meeting Dr Wilbur, Shirley Mason had no multiple personalities. It’s alleged that through highly suggestive questioning and a variety of other techniques applied to a naive and vulnerable patient, Dr Wilbur had encourged these ‘alters’ to emerge.
In 1958 – four years into her therapy – Shirley wrote a letter to her psychiatrist. It began with Shirley admitting she was “none of the things she had pretended to be.”
“I am not going to tell you there isn’t anything wrong with me”, the letter continued, ” but it is not what I have led you to believe. I do not have any multiple personalities. I do not even have a double. I have been essentially lying”.
The rest of the letter laid out Shirley’s belief that she had been misdiagnosed and her admission that she had played along with the error.
She also recanted much of her childhood abuse claims, now explaining that while her mother had been anxious and overly protective and her parents had scolded her in an attempt to cure her of her ‘funny’ ways, the claims of childhood rape, torture and being strung up with ropes were mere fictions.
Connie Wilbur the psychiatrist read the letter and knew straight away she had a problem on her hands. Shirley Mason was not just the most important patient on her books but the most important patient in her entire professional career, not to mention the history of psychiatry up to that point.
Connie had already been discussing her patient with her psychiatry students at the University where she lectured. She also spoke about the case at conferences and with other renown psychiatrists. She had no wish to give this up.
Connie told herself that Shirley’s recantation letter was merely a form of ‘resistance’. It was the ego’s attempt to trick itself into thinking it didn’t need therapy. She set about convincing her star patient that she did need therapy, badly. The fact she was now denying she’d been tortured by her mother, she told Shirley, showed she really HAD been tortured.
A blockbuster book was published back in 1973 that would go on to become a cult classic and sell millions of copies.
SYBIL, written by American journalist Flora Rheta Schreiber (1918 – 1988), told the story of a woman with 16 personalities.
Such was the impact of the book, which three years later would be made into a telemovie starring Sally Field as the title character, (re-made in 2007 with Jessica Lange playing the role of the psychiatrist) it became a cultural phenomena and changed, at least for a number of years, the course of psychiatry.
Years before either of these films were released, another movie based on a real-life case of Multiple Personality Syndrome was leaving it’s mark on audiences.
THE THREE FACES OF EVE was a 1957 American film that earned Joanne Woodward the Academy Award for Best Actress. It was based on a book written by two psychiatrists about a woman named Christine Sizemore who was thought to be ‘inhabitated’ by three distinct indentities.
In an inspired piece of casting, Joanne Woodward would be cast years later as the pyschiatrist in the 1976 movie SYBIL.
If THE THREE FACES OF EVE was popular culture’s entre to the world of Multiple Personality Syndrome, SYBIL was the full- blown, ten course, ‘finest silverwear’ banquet.
Only problem was, many of the details of the real life case concerning the woman that the world would come to know as SYBIL were fake. This is according to a book published in 2011 by American journalist Debbie Nathan.
‘Fake’ is maybe too strong a word. ‘Greatly exaggerated’ is proabably a better description for the mix of half-truths, distortions and outright fabricatons that were used to create and publicise the world’s most famous Multiple Personality Syndrome case.
Over the next few weeks, SCENIC WRITER’SSHACK will seek to seperate fact from fiction and uncover the truth of SYBIL.
Last week I was harking back to my days as a film, theatre and music reviewer for the University Student Newspaper. I ommitted one little yarn that still brings a smile to my face.
A posse of the reviewing staff had been summoned to a meeting inside the ragtag, poster-strewn and dimly-lit cave interior of the student newspaper office.
There we all were, in various reclining poses gathered on the stained red carpet floor that smelled of cigarrettes and booze, when the Editor – a guy I only ever knew as ‘Ed’ – never being certain if it was short for ‘Edward’ or ‘Editor’ – strode in barefoot wearing his faded blue skinny jeans with holes in them (before ripped jeans were a thing), stroking his Fu-Manchu-styled goatee and announced in his most earnest politicians-address-tone, “The record company is complaining about all the bad reviews we’ve been writing”.
At the speed of thought and with not even the flutter of an eyelid, one of our poison pen hacks – a clever wit named Scooter Patterson, who would go on to become a lawyer but not before being arrested and thrown into a McDonalds backroom cold storage freezer for staging a mock hold-up of the restaurant during Prank Week – shot back, ” Tell ’em then WE’RE complaining about all the sh-t records they’re sending us!”
Another thing from this time was the big-time like I had going for one of the celebrity film critics of the day, Pauline Kael (1919 – 2001). She began writing movie reviews for THE NEW YORKER in the late 60’s and continued up until 1991. She published more than a dozen books of film criticism as well during these years.
Such was her influence in the 1970’s, some U.S. film distributors introduced individual press screenings for each critic because her remarks in joint press screenings were thought to be influencing her fellow critics.
Director Quentin Tarrantino grew up reading Kael’s criticism voraciously. He’s been quoted as saying she was as influential as any director was in helping him evolve his own cinematic style.
I so loved the charm, wit and insight – the sheer ‘penmanship magic’ if you will – she brought to all of her reviews (which in the hands of others amounted to little more than glorified plot synopses) I reckon for a time I wanted to BE her, at least in the writing sense. No less than a writing superstar hero was what she was to me.
In 2018 a documentary celebrating her life was released with Sarah Jessica Parker (SEX & THE CITY) narrating.
How I got onto this topic in the first place was checking out a 1963 movie called CRITICS CHOICE. Lucille Ball plays a woman who has always wanted to write a play. Her husband (Bob Hope) who is an acid-tongued newspaper theatre critic is less than encouraging.
This was the last of four films Bob Hope and Lucille Ball made together.
In a movie full of funny lines, Lucille Ball’s character knows too well the downside of being married to a paid opinion giver –
Born critics just can’t help themselves it seems…
Everyone, critics included, used to love this show – for the first five seasons anyway. Get your critical hit of HAPPY DAYS –HERE.
A thousand years ago – give or take a decade – I was a movie critic.
In my madcap and untethered University days, I used to wield the poison pen regular-as-you-like for the University Student Newspaper. Not just film reviews, but music and live theatre as well. If it sang, danced or tried doing anything resembling entertainment, I happily cast judgement.
I remember thinking I’d near won the life lottery every time I got to take home a bunch of free (vinyl) albums from the record company. Same with getting sent along to one of those ‘Press only’ film screenings or scoring complimentary tickets to the latest play showing about town.
Yep, living the life on the fringes of glamour, celebrity and popping ‘Opening Night’ champagne corks I most definitely was. For a while. Or so my nineteen-year-old brain thought.
Slowly however, a sinking realization as heavy and dark as a ready-to-pop rain cloud came floating into view. There was a price to be paid for being showered in entertainment freebies.
That price came in the form of having to sit through, listen through and, towards the end, sleep through literally hour-upon-hour, bucketload upon bucketload of what I would sniffily refer to back then as ‘mediocrity’.
You realize eventually that though you may live in hope for it to be otherwise, masterpieces don’t come along very often. I mean, why would they?
The ‘really goods’ and even just plain ‘ol garden-variety ‘goods’ also, it turns out, manage to stay hidden for long stretches of time.
If you’re seeing lots of ‘entertainments’ – in their great many forms – it’s easy to develop a type of numbness or what could be termed ‘repelling shield’.
You become, in the words of my old mustache-twirling advertising copywriter teacher, ‘hard to impress’.
And when that happens, and you start mistaking your own tastes for some objective, Godly yardstick for quality and what’s worth people’s attention, well… you may very well be on the sunken, sad road to self-deception on the grandest of scales.
That and the fatiguing chore of having to wade through and think up creative ways to talk about just so, so, soooooo much featureless chaff to get to the golden, life-giving wheat, were the reasons I walked away from the life of a critic.
These memories came flooding back to me the other night as I watched an ol’ time Bob Hope movie CRITIC’S CHOICE (1963).
Hope plays a caustic theatre critic whose wife (played by Lucille Ball) decides to write a play. Reviewing his wife’s play on opening night in his usual fault-finding manner leads naturally to all manner of marital strife.Here’s a taste –
Log on next week for…
Critics loved HAPPY DAYS – for the first five seasons anyway. Tune in HERE to get your HAPPY DAYS hit.
On the eve of the Paris Para Olympics, I’m going to tell you about a book I read recently.
BOYCOTT is the story of Australia’s controversial participation in the 1980 Moscow Olympics.
66 countries, led by the United States, boycotted these Olympic games in protest of Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan, which commenced on Christmas Eve 1979.
Australia ended up sending a scaled back team of just 123 athletes (218 were originally selected to go) who marched in the Opening Ceremony carrying not the Australian flag but the Olympic flag.
BOYCOTT author Lisa Forest today is a tv commentator, actor, writer and media personality. Back in 1980, she was the 16-year-old captain of the Australian swim team.
In her book she writes how those Australian athletes who competed at the Russian games were viewed by many people back home as traitors to their country and ‘communist sympathisers’.
Forest talks about the death threats she received by telephone, including one answered by her then 11-year-old sister.
To her way of thinking, NOT attending the games would have sent the wrong message. She quotes a fellow Olympic team member at the time telling a journalist –
And for a little comparison, the Top Ten medal countries from the last Olympics in 2021 –
I always liked Lisa Forest, back in the day. I think it was that smile. She was two years older than me, so in the right range for a sporting ‘crush’, I guess you could say.
Her nickname around that time used to be ‘smiley’, so a positive, chlorine-scented vibe was definitely a large part of who she was. And I’m guessing still is. Though maybe not the chlorine-scented part so much these days.
In this week’s concluding chapter, we witness the amazing end to Onoda’s 30 years in hiding. If you missed the previous three installments, you can catch up HERE – HERE – and HERE.
A Japanese explorer by the name of Norio Suzuki (1949 – 1986) located Onada in the jungle on Lubang island in 1974. Onada refused to end his wartime mission however until he received official orders from his former commanding officer.
The Japanese government organised for Major Yoshimi Taniguchi, Onada’s former war-time commander and by that time an old man working in a Japanese bookstore, to fly to Lubang and officially relieve Hiroo Onada. It was only then, after 30 years of hiding away in the jungle after WW2 had ended, did Onada ‘surrender’.
Upon his arrival back in Japan, Onada was hailed a hero. The Japanese government offered him a large sum of money in back pay, which he refused. When money was pressed on him by well-wishers, he donated it to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo.
In later years, he followed the lead of his brother and moved to Brazil. His wife, who he married in 1976, became head of the Japan Women’s Association (JWA). Hioo Onada lived to the age of 91.
Only one other Japanese soldier held out after the war ended longer than Onada. Private Teruo Nakamura emerged from his hiding place on Morotai Island (Indonesia) only a few months after Hiroo Onada.
And don’t forget…
What could be happier than Hiroo returning a hero (I liked it too) to Japan after 30 years in the jungle?
In this week’s chapter we look at attempts by the Japanese government to convince Onada that the war was over and his one-man-mission should end. If you missed previous installments you can catch them HERE and HERE.
A great many attempts were made over the years to communicate to Onada and his three fellow-hold-out soldiers (the last of whom stayed hiding with him up until just two years before he was finally rescued).
The first of these occured just a month after Japan surrended in September 1945. Onada found a leaflet that had been dropped on Lubang Island by a plane. It read “The war ended on 15 August. Come down from the mountains!” They distrusted the leaflet and concluded that it was Allied propaganda.
Toward the end of 1945, leaflets were again dropped by air, this time with a surrender order printed on them from General Tomoyuki Yamashita of the Fourteenth Area Army. Onoda and his three fellow soldiers studied the leaflet closely to determine whether it was genuine, and decided it was not.
In 1952, letters and family pictures were dropped from a plane urging them to surrender, but the by then three soldiers concluded that this was also a trick.
Onada writes in NO SURRENDER – “My reaction was that the Yankees had outdone themselves this time. I wondered how on Earth they had obtained the photographs. That there was something fishy about the whole thing was beyond doubt, but I could not figure out exactly how the trick had been carried out.”
Onoda had been trained as an intelligence officer, so was naturally suspicious of any communications. One of the search parties that landed on Lubang Island included Hiroo Onada’s own brother, who took to the jungle with a megaphone calling Hiroo’s name.
Onada’s reaction was to think to himself, “That’s really something. They’ve found a prisoner who looks at a distance like my brother, and he’s learned to imitate my brother’s voice perfectly.”
In late 1965, Onada and his (by then) one fellow hold-out had acquired a transistor radio, stolen from one of the local islander’s huts.
Onada writes “What pretended to be a broadcast from Japan or Australia was, to our way of thinking, a tape prepared by the enemy and rebroadcast with suitable changes. We read into the broadcasts the meanings we wanted them to have.”
Next week, in our final instalment, we witness Hiroo Onada finally emerge from the jungle and resume civilian life.
What’s happier than Hiroo Onada taking his first hot shower in 30 years? Click HERE to find out.
