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.
