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 GERALDO RIVERA 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 –
so interesting
Thanks so much for saying that Beth.
It’s interesting to me and I remember the ‘Sybil’ phenomena going around from back when I was a child, but you never can tell what other people may find of interest.
Well, well, well. I watched some of the clips and those women do seem very convincing. Do we know if they actually have multiples or not?
On the lighter side, how odd! I, too, remember sleeping with John F. Kennedy, even though I was born in 1962. Hmm…………..! lol
It’s safe to say John F. had some things ‘going on the side’, as they say, but yeah, those claims seem a cray cray stretch too far.