Book & Movie SYBIL Turns Out To Be Fraud

One of the great things about the 'net is that when you suddenly have
a fleeting interest you can go a Google search & learn a whole lot
about it.

I have more than a fleeting interest in the exposure of hoaxes,
pseudo-science, urban legands & fakes. With urban legands I'm always
fascinated by the geneology & development of the legend & look at
them more as passed down oral legends (ie the ax killer hiding in the
backseat story). With pseudo-science & fakes I am always gratified to
see the bullshit uncovered so that real scientific work can begin.
Nothing gets me more riled up though than crapola like Nostradamus,
astrology & "withcraft".

No place does bad science seem to rear its ugly mug more than in psychiatry. The 1970s & 1980s saw a rash of phony satanic cult scares & many cases of shrinks making kids believe that an innocent parent had
actually molested them, sometimes in ritualistic fashion. Only now
are those who were subjected to "recovered memory therapy" actually
recovering from that malignant brainwashing.

Back when I was a kid the book SYBIL came out (the story of a woman
with 16 seperate personalities). The TV movie starring Sally Field
followed in 1976. Suddenly everywhere you looked people who were once
just moody or depressed were sent to shrinks, put under hypnosis &
labled MPD (Multiple Personality disorder). Attention starved
celebrities (Roseanne Barr & some chic from 8 IS ENOUGH) later claimed to
be amongst the afflicted. It all screams "Hey, you think I'm an
asshole? Well its not ME its one of my OTHER personalities!!"
OR: "You think I'm boring? Well I am interesting dammit!! I have a
bizzare mental illness!!"

My mother, like many middle aged middle class urban women in the
1970s, went back to college & got a degree in psychology (along with
the requisite & hilarious White Woman 'Fro Perm aka the Jewfro).
Unlike many of her classmates though she was skeptical of much of the
pop psychology of the time & did her thesis on detailing the failings
& shortcomings of mass group therapies like EST. Poor Mom, an
amputee, actually endured an EST weekend...well most of it because
when she decided enough was enough & had to pee & refused to go in
her pants (like the rest of the ESTies did) she asked nicely ONCE to
be able to be let out & when she was politely refused my dear old Mom
let loose such virulent string of threats, obscenities & lawsuit
scenerios that the quaking EST managers gladly let her out.

Anyhow, my mother's biggest pet peeve was the whole MPD "hoax" (as
she described it). Out of the blue today (here comes the "fleeting
interest") I thought about SYBIL & did a Google search when lo &
behold I came across the following article from the Associated Press (there were many others but this is the one that sums it up). Anyone else here as
bothered as I am about hoaxes, fakes, pseudo-science & the like? Oh & it turns out "Sybil's" real name was Shirely Ardell Mason. Pop that name into Google & you'll get more of the stories plus pictures of the actual "patient" or "accomplice in fraud" or "victim of a greedy shrink", depending on whom you believe.


Doubt Cast on Story of `Sybil'

By MALCOLM RITTER
.c The Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- A psychologist says tape recordings that lay
forgotten in his desk for 25 years show the popular story of Sybil,
the woman with 16 personalities, is bogus.

In a best-selling 1973 book, later made into a movie, Sybil was
portrayed as developing alternate personalities who did things
without her knowledge. The account blames the problem on abuse Sybil
suffered as a child, and says she overcame it with therapy.

The newfound tapes suggest these personalities were actually created
during therapy, through suggestions to a highly pliable young woman,
says psychologist Robert Rieber of the John Jay College of Criminal
Justice in New York.

Rieber said the tapes of conversations between Sybil's psychiatrist
and the book author show they were "not totally unaware" that the
story they told was wrong.

"Yet at the same time they wished to believe it, no matter what,"
Rieber said. "I would prefer to believe that there was as much self-
deception as deception of others. They were not malicious people."

An expert on multiple personalities said although he doesn't know
whether Sybil's personalities were created in therapy, Rieber's
written report sheds no light on the question.

Dr. Richard Gottlieb, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry
at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, also said the
report fails to show the book was a conscious misrepresentation.

Sybil's psychiatrist, Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, died in 1992, and the
book's author, Flora Rheta Schreiber, died in 1988.

Rieber spoke in an interview before presenting his conclusions Sunday
at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association. He
said he got the tapes in 1972 from Schreiber, then a colleague at
John Jay College, but forgot about them until a conversation about
Sybil in 1997.

One excerpt in his report quotes Wilbur telling Schreiber, "And I
said, `Well, there's a personality who calls herself Peggy.' And uh,
I said, `She is pretty assertive. ... She can do things you can't,'
and she (Sybil) was very, uh, obviously perturbed by this. ... And I
said ... `She wouldn't do anything you wouldn't approve of. She might
do something that you wouldn't think of doing."'

The excerpt also lists three other personalities.

That shows Wilbur was "carving out the characters" for Sybil to
absorb, Rieber said. Gottlieb, however, said Wilbur may merely have
been describing what she'd observed in therapy.

The tapes also show Schreiber improperly dismissing a letter Sybil
wrote to Wilbur in which she denies having multiple personalities,
Rieber said. The letter is reproduced in Rieber's book.

Rieber's conclusions fall in line with previously published opinions
by Dr. Herbert Spiegel, a New York psychiatrist who used Sybil in
hypnotism research and says he was her surrogate therapist when
Wilbur was out of town.

Spiegel also concluded that Sybil's so-called personalities actually
arose from Wilbur's therapeutic technique of giving names to various
emotional states Sybil experienced. The problem was that Wilbur
mistakenly came to believe that they really were distinct
personalities, Spiegel said.

He said Sybil told him one day that Wilbur wanted her "to be Helen"
when talking about a particular event in Sybil's past.

Spiegel suggested talking about the event just as Sybil.

"Then she discovered she didn't have to act like Helen in order to
talk about it. ... It became clear Wilbur was coaching her to be
these different people. It was a very dramatic way of carrying out
therapy," Spiegel said.

He also said he told Schreiber that Sybil didn't have multiple
personalities, and "Schreiber said, `If we don't call it multiple
personality the publisher won't want it, it won't sell."

But Dr. Leah Dickstein of the University of Louisville in Kentucky,
who said she was in touch with Sybil for several years after Wilbur's
death, recalls Sybil telling her, "`tell people every word in the
book is true."'

Dickstein, who knew Wilbur, said Wilbur "had no need to make this
up."

AP-NY-08-16-98 1637EDT

hrm. well someone has a good imagination.
at least theres a good movie still.

Right on, cydonorb. I too hate pseudoscience. We should have a seperate forum devoted to skepticism.

does that mean she didn't have that deranged abusive mom? does that mean the accounts of what her mom did to her, the language she used, never happened? THAT stuff was the heart of her story, not her MPD disorder. Call her illness whatever the hell you want--a disorder is dialogue for clinicians only anyway, not for everyday people to use back and forth at each other for labels and validation. i just want to know if the abuse really happened. if it did, i am scared to pieces about what abuse other children are experiencing today because i can't think of another abuse account in my life or other's peoples that is as mortifying as her's.

Here is a long (but fascinating) article about the SYBIL case. It seems that the unfortunate young woman was victimized first by her mother during adolecence & then by an egomaniacal shrink in her adulthood. The numbers that appear throughout the article refer to the footnotes at the end. Although long this article is compelling reading & makes you want to dig up Dr Wilbur & slap her corpse around for a while.



Sybil: The Making
of a Disease?
An interview with Dr. Herbert Spiegel


Originally appeared in the New York Review of Books.


By MIKKEL BORCH-JACOBSEN
April 24, 1997

Only seldom can we date the emergence of a psychiatric syndrome with such precision: Multiple Personality Disorder (or MPD, as it is known to psychiatrists) was born in 1973 with the publication of Flora Rheta Schreiber's book Sybil.1 Not that Sybil was the first book ever devoted to a case of multiple personality, far from it: Sybil belongs in fact to a well-established genre that includes, among others, Theodore Flournoy's From India to the Planet Mars (1899), Morton Prince's The Dissociation of a Personality (1906), Corbett H. Thigpen andHervey Cleckley's The Three Faces of Eve (1954) -- not to mention Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886).

But Schreiber's book was, as Ian Hacking points out,2 the first one that firmly tied multiple personality to child abuse, a notion that had gained widespread recognition in the 1960s and that was to become an essential feature of present-day Multiple Personality Disorder. As the psychiatrist Frank W. Putnam writes in his authoritative textbook on MPD: "It was not until the 1970s, that the first reports clearly connecting MPD to childhood trauma began to appear in single case histories. Among the first and best-known was the case of Sybil, treated by Cornelia Wilbur and dramatized by Schreiber."3

A journalist specializing in psychiatric issues and a regular contributor to Science Digest, Flora Rheta Schreiber described in her book the strange case of a young woman, "Sybil," who had developed no fewer than sixteen separate personalities in order to cope with severe physical and sexual abuse. In addition to having been exposed to her parents' love-making in classic Freudian style, Sybil had suffered bizarre and perverse sexual abuse at the hands of her mother, in a manner that is more reminiscent of Freud's earlier "seduction theory." The mother, for instance, would have her watch while she was masturbating other young children; she would force odd objects into Sybil's vagina, or again, hang her in the air, insert an enema tip into her urethra, and fill the bladder with ice-cold water.

Sybil, the main personality, had no memory of all of this, but her other "personalities" did, and they dutifully informed Sybil's New York psychiatrist, Cornelia C. Wilbur, in the course of a treatment that relied on hypnosis, "abreaction" -- the cathartic release of anxiety through reliving intense experiences -- and the administration of heavy doses of countertransference. As a result of this unorthodox treatment, which Schreiber described generously as "the first psychoanalysis of a multiple personality,"4 Sybil's sixteen selves eventually fused, thus forming a seventeenth and cured self. "The New Sybil" was born, after hard psychoanalytic labor that took, according to Schreiber, eleven years and 2,354 office sessions.5 Although names and facts had to be disguised for the sake of confidentiality, Schreiber insisted that her book was based on empirical data, such as Dr. Wilbur's case notes and tape recordings of analytic sessions, Sybil's diaries and correspondence, and family and hospital records.

This gothic tale of abuse was no fiction, as Dr. Wilbur warned in the book when Sybil compared herself to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: "Dr. Wilbur slapped her hand in her fist. 'That's not a true story,' she said. 'It's pure fiction. You are not at all like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Stevenson wasn't a psychoanalyst. He created these two characters out of his literary imagination. As a writer he was concerned only with spinning a good yarn.'"6 The New York Times soon ranked Sybil among the ten best-selling nonfiction books of the year, and the book was quickly turned into a Hollywood movie with Joanne Woodward, the former cinematic incarnation of The Three Faces of Eve, in the role of Cornelia Wilbur. ___

Schreiber was deluged with letters from women thanking her for helping them understand that they were "multiples,"7 and it was not long before pioneering psychiatrists like Ralph B. Allison, George Greaves, and Eugene Bliss started finding cases of multiple personality among their patients. Within a few years of the distribution of Sybil, there appeared a number of best-selling biographies of multiple personalities clearly modeled on Schreiber's book: The Five of Me (1977), Tell Me Who I Am Before I Die (1978), Michelle Remembers (1980), The Minds of Billy Milligan (1981), to name only a few. As Frank W. Putnam writes:


The case of Sybil...is the one most often credited with reintroducing the public and the mental health professions to the syndrome of multiple personality.... The book Sybil, with its graphic treatment of the amnesias, fugue episodes, child abuse, and conflicts among alters, served as a template against which other patients could be compared and understood.... Schreiber's account is both detailed and accurate enough to serve as mandatory clinical reading for students of MPD.8 Thanks to the efforts of Putnam, Bennett G. Braun, and Richard P. Kluft, the diagnosis of "Multiple Personality Disorder" was eventually included in the 1980 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition, the authoritative psychiatric diagnostic manual, known as DSM-III, and it soon became widely accepted, although in the DSM-IV (1994) the name has been changed to Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID).9 Among the results has been a general redefinition of psychotherapeutic practice in terms of "trauma" and "dissociative disorders" (and also bitter battles in court around cases of memories of sexual or satanic ritual abuse recovered during therapy). Some proponents of the new diagnosis have claimed in the press and on television that one to three percent of the general population is suffering from MPD.10 One may disagree with these estimates, but certainly not with the fact that we are faced with a major threat to mental health.

What became of the three main characters of this success story? Flora Rheta Schreiber subsequently wrote a second best-selling book, this time on the Philadelphia cobbler Joseph Kallinger, a serial killer whose crime spree she claimed was the result of child abuse.11 She was unsuccessfully sued by the families of Kallinger's victims12 and died shortly thereafter. After the end of Sybil's treatment, Cornelia C. Wilbur moved on to a medical position in psychiatry at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, where she conducted research on multiple personality, dissociation, and altered states of consciousness with Arnold Ludwig and others. She died in 1992, after a career as a cult figure within the MPD movement. As to the elusive Sybil, all efforts to crack the wall of secrecy that surrounds her have been in vain so far. Some say that she holds an academic position in an art school, others that she owns an art gallery somewhere in the Midwest. In 1987, in response to an inquiry from a reader, the Boston Globe reported that Dr. Wilbur "confirms that Sybil is indeed alive."13

With Schreiber and Wilbur now gone, very few people are left who seem to know her true identity. One of them is Herbert Spiegel, M.D., coauthor with Abram Kardiner of an important book on traumatic war neuroses14 and a recognized specialist in hypnosis. Although bound by medical confidentiality, Dr. Spiegel was willing to discuss with me his memories of Sybil, whom he knew well at the time when she was in treatment with Cornelia Wilbur. What follows is a transcript of the interview I had with him in his New York City office in May 1995.

MIKKEL BORCH-JACOBSEN: How did you meet Cornelia Wilbur?

HERBERT SPIEGEL: I didn't know her very well. I had seen her at meetings at the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, and she knew that I had done a lot of work with hypnosis. I got a phone call from her one day, telling me that she had a patient that she had been treating as schizophrenic and she had a peculiar feeling that this was not schizophrenia at all. She asked me if I could examine the patient and help her clarify the diagnosis.

MBJ: That was Sybil?

HS: Yes, that was Sybil.

MBJ: When was that?

HS: This must have been in the late Sixties. As I'm thinking about it now -- and here's a commentary on the accuracy of memory -- it could be maybe the mid-Sixties. I remember seeing Sybil over a period of about four years. Then by the time the book came out in 1973 quite a bit of time had passed.

MBJ: So this was approximately ten years after the beginning of Sybil's treatment. I say "approximately" for it is not entirely clear when Sybil entered into analysis with Wilbur. In the book by Flora Rheta Schreiber, we read that Wilbur had had her in treatment for a brief time in Omaha in the summer of 1945, and that the analysis properly so-called started only in October 1954, when Sybil moved to New York to study art at Columbia University.15 But in an interview she gave to Moshe Torem shortly before she died, Wilbur states that she started seeing Sybil in 1952.16 Do you have any idea of when the treatment actually began?

HS: I have no idea. I never inquired about that. Wilbur just told me that she had known her for a long time.

MBJ: Wilbur's diagnosis had been of schizophrenia, right?

HS: Yes, but as I said, she was beginning to doubt whether or not [Sybil] was schizophrenic. She wanted to know if I could hypnotize a schizophrenic. I said no, usually schizophrenics are not hypnotizable, but it would be useful to test that out, because that could help sharpen up the diagnosis.

MBJ: So before consulting you about the case, Cornelia Wilbur had unsuccessfully treated Sybil for a schizophrenia for a period of, let's say, over ten years?

HS: I guess you could make that inference.

MBJ: She was using classic psychoanalytic treatment, I presume?

HS: Well, I don't know how classical she was. I never went into that with her. My contacts with her were only about Sybil. I must tell you, Wilbur was not an easy person to talk to -- as a matter of fact she was like an angry woman. Even after working together with her on Sybil for several years, we would see each other at a meeting and I'd be pleased if she said hello, but then she'd just pass on by. There was something peculiar about her as a person.

MBJ: Your account doesn't tally at all with the account of the case that we find in Sybil, for there Schreiber claims that Wilbur met "Peggy," one of Sybil's alternate personalities, as early as December 1954, that is to say two months after the treatment supposedly started.17 But you are saying that after approximately ten years of analysis with Sybil, Wilbur was still considering her as a schizophrenic and had actually no clue whatsoever about the case?

HS: I remember vividly the first conversation I had with her about this. She said that she had treated Sybil for a long time as a schizophrenic, but that she was having some doubts now and wanted to know whether Sybil was hypnotizable. That is all I know.

MBJ: So she didn't mention multiple personality to you?

HS: Not at that time. No.

MBJ: What happened next?

HS: I examined Sybil and discovered that she was highly hypnotizable. As a matter of fact, I was so intrigued with her high hypnotizability that I asked Cornelia if it was okay if I did some age-regression studies on her. Cornelia said yes, so I used Sybil for a lot of studies. That's when I developed a rapport with Sybil. Then Cornelia called me up one day and said she had to be out of town for about a week. She was concerned about the occasional suicidal impulses that Sybil had and wanted to know if I could take over as a surrogate therapist during that period, which I did. I saw Sybil maybe about three times during that week as her surrogate therapist. This happened subsequently, for in the meantime I had been seeing Sybil on an entirely different basis. Cornelia was doing the therapy, and I didn't get involved with what she was doing. I was doing research with Sybil, using her as a demonstration case at our classes in hypnosis at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons.

MBJ: Where you did age-regressions?

HS: Yes. She was very hypnotizable, what I call a "grade five."18 On a zero to five scale we can classify most levels of hypnotizability. The top group -- the hypnotic virtuosos -- are about 5 percent of the population and they show extra phenomena that we don't ordinarily see even in good hypnotic subjects. For example, they have the ability to regress in time and they will report past experiences in the present tense. It is as if they "ablate," or remove from memory, the period of time from, say, their fourth birthday to the present time, and you have an expression of what was there up until the age of four. For most people, to get them to a fixed point in time, we use something that has an affect potential. You can't just say, "I want you to go back to January 14, 1916" -- that doesn't mean anything. You will say to the subject: "You are getting younger and younger. You are now nineteen, eighteen, seventeen years old, twelve years old, seven years old," and then: "This is your fourth birthday." Now, Sybil had all the other phenomena of being highly hypnotizable: she had amnesias that you could command her to have for certain events; she had post-hypnotic sensory motor alterations on command; you could stimulate hallucinations with her, which only the hypnotic virtuosos can ever achieve. But when I regressed her to her fourth birthday, she didn't show that same kind of precise orientation in time and space that other patients did. I was puzzled, so I called Wilbur about that, and it turned out that Sybil was not allowed to have birthdays. She was a member of some kind of Protestant sect out in the Midwest where they didn't celebrate birthdays. So I shifted to Christmas of her fourth year, and then we got the same effect that other people would have when you regress them down to their fourth birthday.

MBJ: When did you learn about Sybil's alternate personalities?

HS: Not at the beginning. Our understanding was that she was not going to tell me that much of what was going on in the therapy. But one day during our regression studies, Sybil said, "Well, do you want me to be Helen?" And I said, "What do you mean?" And she said, "Well, when I'm with Dr. Wilbur she wants me to be Helen." I said, "Who's Helen?" "Well, that's a name Dr. Wilbur gave me for this feeling." So I said, "Well, if you want to it's all right, but it's not necessary." With me, Sybil preferred not to "be Helen." With Wilbur, it seemed she felt an obligation to become another personality. That's when I realized that Connie was helping her identify aspects of her life, or perspectives, that she then called by name. By naming them this way, she was reifying a memory of some kind and converting it into a "personality."

MBJ: In her book, Flora Rheta Schreiber describes how Wilbur, starting in autumn 1959, would age-regress her patient with the help of hypnosis and then have the various alternate personalities "grow up" until they reached the same age as the actual Sybil, the "host-personality."19 But if what you are saying is true, Wilbur didn't do any of this before sending Sybil to you. Do you know whether Wilbur had ever practiced hypnosis before that?

HS: To my knowledge, Connie knew little about hypnosis, and that is why she asked me to see Sybil. In my conversations with her she was profoundly ignorant of the whole hypnotic phenomenon. Had she known enough about hypnosis in the first place, she would never have sent Sybil to see me at all.

MBJ: Again, this doesn't tally with Schreiber's account. In her book, Schreiber writes: "Before she [Wilbur] had become a psychoanalyst, she had used hypnosis successfully with other patients. Now [Autumn 1959] she would experiment with hypnosis in analysis. Once again shedecided that she was ready to pioneer."20 To your knowledge, is this an accurate account?

HS: Well, it's not consistent with what Wilbur told me.

MBJ: In other words, Sybil's alternate personalities appeared only after Cornelia Wilbur had started dabbling in hypnosis and not five years before, in 1954, as is claimed in the book. This is of course a crucial point, since we might well suspect that Sybil's multiple personality was a byproduct of hypnosis. Would you say that it was Connie Wilbur's uncontrolled experiments in hypnotic age-regression that ultimately created Sybil's alternate personalities?

HS: It could be that, but I think there was another factor, too. Sybil told me that she had read The Three Faces of Eve,21 Thigpen and Cleckley's book on a case of multiple personality. She was very impressed with that book. One outstanding feature of highly hypnotizable subjects is their histrionic way of making statements. I have the impression that Sybil learned from reading this book that she could express her agonies and her stresses in life through the histrionic display of multiple personalities, especially if it were encouraged by the therapist.

MBJ: Still, it strikes me that Wilbur's use of hypnosis in the treatment mimicked the age-regression studies that you had done at Columbia University with Sybil.

HS: There is a difference, however. When I used regression studies with Sybil, I was not interested in getting historical data about her life. I was only testing her to see how she responded to standardized tests. I was not involved in these horrendous stories about how she was allegedly abused as a child. Not that I was surprised to hear that, because I knew that her mother had been a patient in a psychiatric hospital and I assumed that she was schizophrenic. Sybil having had a bizarre, erratic mother, I could easily accept the idea that she had been physically hurt by her. I didn't interpret her mother as being intentionally cruel. She was a psychotic.

MBJ: Did Sybil ever mention to you all these memories of sexual abuse?

HS: Occasionally it came up. But I was interested in Sybil as a researcher, not a therapist. The days when I would see her as a surrogate therapist my function was to contain, not explore. I purposely made no explorations into that kind of history.

MBJ: Wilbur and Schreiber claim that they were able to corroborate all of Sybil's allegations about the mother's sexual and sadistic abuse. Do you have any knowledge of this?

HS: No, I don't. Judging from the quality of their pursuit of accuracy when they were dealing with me, my impression is that some gestures were made. But I don't know how thorough Wilbur and Schreiber were in corroborating their data. Don't forget, they were writing a story.

MBJ: As far as these episodes of sexual and sadistic abuse are concerned, it seems that Sybil recanted at some point in the course of the analysis. We know this because Flora Rheta Schreiber quotes in her book a letter that Sybil supposedly sent to her analyst on August 17, 1959, in which she wrote:


I am not going to tell you there isn't anything wrong. We both know there is. But it is not what I have led you to believe. I do not have any multiple personalities. I don't even have a "double" to help me out. I am all of them. I have been essentially lying in my pretense of them. The dissociations are not the problem because they do not actually exist, but there is something wrong or I would not resort to pretending like that. And you might ask me about my mother. The extreme things I told you about her were not true. My mother was more than a little nervous. At times she was flighty, clever, overanxious, but she did love me.... My parents were better than a lot of parents are.22
Now Schreiber presents this letter as a symptom of denial on the part of Sybil, stating that she lost time for two days after having written it. Is it not possible, however, that Wilbur forced the issue by refusing to take Sybil's recantation seriously?

HS: Very possible. You see, that is one of the biggest difficulties with working with the concept of causation in psychotherapy. It is the grand illusion that we have inherited from Freud. Freud's concept was that you had to get the truth, and unless you get the truth no therapeutic effect can take place. So, in the pursuit of the truth we become engaged in storytelling and we impose our hypothesis on the patient by the way we ask our questions. Highly suggestible people will of course respond in a way that can please the doctors, especially if there is a good rapport between them. That is why I think it is an illusion to believe that we can establish a valid causation for multiple personality, or for almost any kind of psychiatric illness.

MBJ: So you would say that Wilbur repeated Freud's mistakes?

HS: Yes, I think that she was influenced by the Freudian model of showing causation. Freud was the one who really promoted this concept.

MBJ: I find it odd that you are not mentioned anywhere in Schreiber's book, in spite of the fact that you clearly played a crucial role in the case. The only place where your name appears is in the acknowledgments, which I would like to quote here: "Dr. Herbert Spiegel, who did age regressions on Sybil and described her as a 'brilliant hysteric,' gave several hours to a valuable discussion of this case, which he knew first-hand."23 How come Wilbur and Schreiber didn't credit you for your role?

HS: I think they were both angry with me because I refused to collaborate with them on the book. Wilbur had decided she was going to make the Sybil case into a book, because she couldn't get it published in professional journals. So she engaged Schreiber, who was a professional writer, and they both came to see me to ask me if I wanted to be a coauthor with them. That was the original proposal: since I had all this information about the case, would I join in with them? We didn't spell out the fine print, because we didn't even get to the big print. I said, "Hmm. That's interesting." I had a lot of stuff to show them. But toward the end of our discussion, they said they would be calling her a "multiple personality." I said, "But she's not a multiple personality!" I think she was a wonderful hysterical patient with role confusion, which is typical of high hysterics. It was hysteria. Back in those days, Multiple Personality Disorder was not yet in the DSM. To me, a multiple personality meant you had to have an "alter" -- that is, a distinct alternate personality -- that was enduring, assuming control over the person for a considerable period of time, and that there was an amnesia barrier between one alter and another, as in the case, reported by William James, of Ansel Bourne, an American who forgot his identity and developed a second personality.24

I didn't see this at all in Sybil. I saw her "personalities" rather as game-playing. I wasn't angry at Cornelia about this. I thought this was an ingenious way of identifying different episodes and events in Sybil's life, and if they wanted to label it or name it in a given way, that was fine. But I thought this was all emerging simply [because of] Connie's wanting to make sense out of the disparate life experience that Sybil had. I could change Sybil's state of awareness just by regressing her to this and that, but that didn't make her a multiple personality. It didn't mean that a personality was enduring or was taking charge of her life. So I told Wilbur and Schreiber that it would not be accurate to call Sybil a multiple personality, and that it was not at all consistent with what I knew about her.

Schreiber then got in a huff. She was sitting right in that chair there, and she said, "But if we don't call it a multiple personality, we don't have a book! The publishers want it to be that, otherwise it won't sell!" That was the logic behind their calling Sybil a multiple personality. I gathered from what Schreiber said that she had already been thinking along those lines after she had had her first contact with Wilbur, and that Wilbur, as a result, intensified the importance of what had started off as a casual thing, because it would make a sellable book. So I said, "OK, go ahead, but I don't want to be identified with that." Both women were very angry. I offered that they could have the data, but they felt so angry with me because I disagreed with them on their diagnosis that they refused. I never heard from Schreiber after that. I ran into Cornelia Wilbur at a psychiatric meeting somewhere, and where ordinarily she would at least nod and say hello, this time she turned her head the other way.

MBJ: This reaction on their part seems to indicate that they expected much from you and that they considered you as a very important player in the case, doesn't it?

HS: Well, they did ask me to join them. But after I refused, they decided that they could do without me. I suspect they did no more than what most do when writing up their reports -- you make up your own stories.

MBJ: With the benefit of hindsight, do you regret having taken that position?

HS: Had I known at that time that this was going to start a whole new cult, a whole new wave of hysteria restated in a new way, would I have wanted my name more closely associated with it? No, I'm embarrassed by it all! I think this chapter of MPD will go down in history as an embarrassing phase of American psychiatry. Other countries are not taken in by it, except possibly some Dutch people who came over here and learned about it here, but basically it's a hysterical response to hysteria.

MBJ: In her book, Flora Rheta Schreiber describes herself as one of Sybil's friends, whom she allegedly met in 1962, eleven years before the book appeared. In her interview with Moshe Torem, however, Wilbur relates how Schreiber, when she approached her about the possibility of writing up the case "for popular consumption," "said she would not begin the work until the patient was completely integrated as one individual."25 Do you think that this pressing and obviously market-oriented request for a therapeutic happy ending played a role in Sybil's eventual "fusion" in one personality?

HS: Yes, I do think that way, and it is quite consistent with the way other fusions take place. When the hospital insurance starts to run out, or when families say, "Look, we've spent enough money on this, we can't pay for this anymore," that's when fusion takes place. It also is consistent with another whole point of view: is it really necessary to dissect, reify, and label all these alters to get a fusion? This so-called "fusion" is a putting together of what was artificially broken up in the first place. When I have people with transient dissociations where they temporarily lose their sense of identity -- which is consistent with a "grade five syndrome" -- I put them together. I fuse them right away, just as Pierre Janet did. The point is to help restore a sense of control as soon as possible. I would also like to say that all of this multiple personality business rarely takes place when financial resources are not available or when the patient has no legal or social reason to evade responsibility. It seems to be related to the amount of money the patients have to indulge in this kind of invalidism of histrionic display. Then when that money starts to run out, or the legal issues are resolved, the fusion takes place. That is a sad commentary on the motivation of some therapists.

MBJ: In her book, Schreiber claims that Sybil, once cured, stayed for two weeks with her mother, Esther, before moving to another part of the country where she had been offered a position in an academic institution. But according to Brett Kahr, a close friend of Schreiber's whom I interviewed two years ago in London, in reality Sybil stayed for more than a year with the two women and became very close to Esther Schreiber, all this while Flora Rheta Schreiber was writing the book about her. In view of your having known the real Sybil and her need for attention, what are your thoughts about this close, quasi-familial

relationship between the author and her "subject"? Don't you think this somehow tainted the objectivity of the alleged "case study" -- especially as Sybil was offered a third of the benefits to be generated by the book, as I happen to know through Brett Kahr?

HS: Yes, Schreiber told me too that Sybil was going to get part of the royalties. Now as to their living together, I think that was therapeutically good because Sybil had not had the comfort of living in a protective atmosphere. To have the protection of two women who were seriously concerned with her and looking out for her was probably a very good therapeutic experience for her. As a matter of fact I've often felt that that would be a good model for a lot of therapeutic programs if it were practical. It's not, but it would be great. Using the transference that Sybil had with both the therapist and the writer who was going to glamourize this whole thing with a new sense of recognition obviously influenced the story they told. At least this had the advantage of giving Sybil a period of time in which she could be relatively secure. Another interesting aspect of the treatment that Connie offered was in itself a good therapeutic thing. Sybil often stayed with Wilbur and did work for her in her apartment while she was in treatment. That kind of supervisory containment, supportive care, intertwined with a part-time living together -- I think that there's something to be said for that. Somebody who has such a fragile sense of integration as Sybil had may just need that.

MBJ: But couldn't you say that such an arrangement, apart from influencing the narrative told by the therapist and the writer, also created an artificial bond between all these people?

HS: Yes, sure. It became a folie à trois. But from the point of view of the patient, it may have been quite beneficial.

MBJ: So you would say that the writing of the book was therapeutic?

HS: Yes, I think it was. As a matter of fact, I think having Sybil appear in front of the classes at Columbia was a therapeutic thing for her too. She felt so important. She looked forward to it. It gave her a sense of being an important person. One of the very interesting and persistently subtle qualities about a highly hypnotizable person with "grade five syndrome" is that they have an ongoing sense of inferiority. It is as if when something goes wrong they feel immediately that they are at fault -- in contrast to the borderline personality disorders, where if something goes wrong, it is always your fault. Sybil was a good artist, and she was exceptionally bright -- she had an IQ of 174 -- but she never made good use of it because of disruptive influences in her life. To get this kind of support over a long period of time enabled her to go out on her own after the book went out. It's unconventional, but I would regard it from the patient's point of view as favorable for her.

MBJ: One final question. Why didn't you speak out about all this before quite recently?

HS: Because I was never asked, as you are now asking me. I did discuss this with my students and colleagues, but did not feel pressed to put it into print until now. Also, I think it is important to tell this story now that there is such mischief going on with the abuse of "recovered memories." To me, the role of therapists in this whole phenomenon of multiple personality and victimization is more intriguing than the patients themselves. The therapists, with some exceptions, have become unconscious con artists. They are taking highly malleable, suggest-ible persons and molding them into acting out a thesis that they are putting upon them. I'm intrigued by that, for you can't do that with obsessive compulsives, you can't do it with schizophrenics or depressed people. But you can do it with highly hypnotizable people.

I think in this respect that the MPD phenomenon of Sybil is an artifact that was created by Connie Wilbur. Another interesting thing about this is that most of the central enthusiasts involved in the Multiple Personality movement do not know much about the subtleties of high hypnotizability and the histrionic personality. They think that hypnosis is something you do to somebody. They don't have the basic understanding that hypnosis is a phenomenon that frequently goes on without formal instructions intended to induce a hypnotic state. You don't hypnotize another person; all you do is identify their capacity and then show them how to purposefully go into and exit from the trance state -- if they don't come out of it spontaneously. Formal induction ceremonies can elicit hypnotic phenomena, but are not necessary. Most "highs" often enter spontaneous trance states. Wilbur did not know that at all. With one or two exceptions, most of the other luminaries in the MPD field know very little about hypnosis. They all acknowledge that MPDs are highly hypnotizable, but most of them do not even measure for hypnotizability. They now have a "Dissociative Experiences Scale," or DES, that Putnam and Bernstein have developed,26 but that doesn't differentiate the highly hypnotizable person from the psychopath, the borderlines, or the schizophrenics. It picks up dissociation, but you need to measure suggestibility too. You see, hypnosis involves absorption, dissociation, and suggestibility. You have to have all three at high levels. Dissociation alone is not enough to identify the hypnotizability.

If the MPD therapists knew more about hypnosis, their diagnoses would be more accurate. As it is now, they don't even know how they are molding their outcomes. They manipulate both the highly hypnotizable and the psychopath. The "grade fives" are highly suggestible and gullible, and they just do what they're cued to do, quite innocently. They seem like pure multiples after they're coached. But most of the patients that the MPD experts have in the wards are not highly hypnotizable, so what they are actually playing around with are borderlines and psychopaths who enter into the game for different reasons.

These patients are full of anger and guile. They feel victimized and tend to blame others for their misbehavior. They then find a doctor who can conjoin with them to develop a story of abuse which appears to be a multiple personality disorder, thus giving them a new kind of status in society. They will make use of all this alleged or real abuse which took place in their life, as a way of getting recognition: "Look, I'm a multiple!" They don't have to do it on their own anymore. Nowadays, they have the collusion of a therapist who is showing them how to do it. And then they can have hospital stays for months to years that the insurance companies pay for. But I understand that the insurance companies are wising up and are cutting down on this. This may well be the end of the whole epidemic that started with Sybil, for I predict that the "fusions" will come much earlier now.

---
1 Flora Rheta Schreiber, Sybil (Regnery, 1973).

2 Ian Hacking, "Multiple Personality Disorder and Its Hosts," History of the Human Sciences 5 (1992), No. 2, p. 8.

3 Frank W. Putnam, Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder (Guilford Press, 1989), p. 47.

4 Flora Rheta Schreiber, Sybil, second edition (Warner Books, 1974), p. 13. Schreiber forgets Anna O., the arch-patient of psychoanalysis, who was a clear case of dual personality. See Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Remembering Anna O: A Century of Mystification(Routledge, 1996).

5 Schreiber, Sybil, p. 15.

6 Schreiber, Sybil, p. 115.

7 Interview with Brett Kahr, director of the British Institute for Psycho-History and organizer of the Flora Rheta Schreiber Memorial, London, April 1993.

8 Putnam, Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder, p. 35.

9 Myron Boor, "The Multiple Personality Epidemic:Additional Cases and Inferences Regarding Diagnosis, Etiology, Dynamics, and Treatment," Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 170 (1982), pp. 302-304.

10 Richard J. Loewenstein, in the French TVdocumentary by Ilan Flammer, "La mimoire abusie" (Arte, 1994).

11 Flora Rheta Schreiber, The Shoemaker:The Anatomy of a Psychopath (Simon andSchuster, 1983).

12 See "Kallinger Victims Lost Privacy Suit over Book," Philadelphia Inquirer, February 19, 1988, p. B7.

13 "Ask The Globe," Boston Globe, August 13, 1987, Section:National/Foreign, p. 40.

14 Abram Kardiner and Herbert Spiegel, War Stress and Neurotic Illness (Hoeber, 1947).

15 Schreiber, Sybil, pp. 41 and 56.

16 Cornelia B. Wilbur, with Moshe Torem, "A Memorial for Cornelia B. Wilbur, M.D., in Her Own Words:Excerpts From Interviews and an Autobiographical Reflection," Clinical Perspectives on Multiple Personality Disorder, edited by Richard P. Kluft and Catherine G. Fine (American Psychiatric Press, 1993), p. xxviii.

17 Schreiber, Sybil, p. 65.

18 Herbert Spiegel, "The Grade Five Syndrome:The Highly Hypnotizable Person," The International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis 22 (1974), pp. 303-319; on the Hypnotic Induction Profile (HIP), see Herbert Spiegel and David Spiegel, Trance and Treatment, Clinical Use of Hypnosis (Basic Books, 1978; American Psychiatric Press, 1989); and Donald S. Connery, The Inner Source:Exploring Hypnosis with Herbert Spiegel (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982), Chapter 9.

19 Schreiber, Sybil, p. 384.

20 Schreiber, Sybil, p. 384.

21 C. H. Thigpen and H. Cleckley, The Three Faces of Eve (McGraw-Hill, 1957). Flora Rheta Schreiber mentions that Sybil had also seen the movie based on this book; see Sybil, p. 381.

22 Schreiber, Sybil, p. 374.

23 Schreiber, Sybil, p. 18.

24 See William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 369-371.

25 Wilbur and Torem, "AMemorial for Cornelia B. Wilbur, M.D., in Her Own Words," p. xxix.

26 Eve M. Bernstein and Frank W. Putnam, "Development, Reliability, and Validity of a Dissociation Scale," Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 174 (1986), pp. 727-735.

BTW if you want to get a glimpse of the actual patient, her name was Shriley Ardell Mason. Just pluf the name into Google & you'll gets LOTS of results. She lived the rest of her life in Kentucky as an artist & art teacher. There are numerous articles with ther picture.

again, was all the ABUSE true? if it was, why is the shrink to blame when she is the one that made the truth of the abuse come to the surface? she may be to blame for thinking sybil has many personalities, but that does not mean she did not to do her a good service by validating the abuse, because she did. Regardless, MPD and DID do exist and are true disorders, so it's not like this shrink invented this shit. Further, sybil's story was not soley about her disorder, it was about the telling of a unbelievable horrific childhood and what it does to people. i could care less if she had a disorder --for the pain she went through, i am surprised she even lived. she does not have to have a disorder for her story to be valid. I've seen all sorts of articles about the myth of the personality disorder, and it doesn't mean shit. Who gives a fuck what your opinion of the concept of a disorder is. The reason why there even is such a thing as that disorder is for dialogue purposes between therapists, so they have a shorthand way of describing part of a patient's condition. it's not for communication to the mass public, and it's not meant to be a label. it's shorthand. There's no talk about the reasons for why people have them, that's what needs to be addressed. there are many stories about people with multiple personalities that don't get made a big deal out of because the reason they have the disorder is a harmless one. sybil's was a very harmful one. i haven't read ANYTHING talking about what part of the abuse was true and what wasn't, which leads me to believe that the whole damn thing was true. how the fuck was that mom not imprisoned at some point.

You didn't read the article carefully enough. The point here is that "Sybil" was abused twice--once by her mother & again by a quack shrink. I have no doubt that Sybil was better off after her therapy BUT she would've been MUCH better off with a doctor that was more interested in curing her than making herself famous. Using junk science always turns out badly & Dr Wilbur's bullshit has only made many hysterics believe they are MPD.s.

BTW it does look like Sybil was indeed abused they way the book relates. If you put her real name into Google (again its Shirley Ardell Mason) you'll find a few articles about her, photos of her & examples of her artwork. There's one article--I forget which publication but its one of the top 20 Google searches under Sybil & Shirley Ardell Mason--where a researcher went back to Dodge Center Minn (where "Sybil" was really from) & found that as soon as he mentioned the book SYBIL to anyone who lived there when Mason did they all said "oh yeah, Shirley, Walter & Crazy Maddie's girl" (in the book the mother is "Hattie"). Apparently everyone knew Maddie was crazy but it wasn't until their own kids were older (& the Ardells moved away) that the abuse she inflicted on THEM came to light. Apparently "Sybil"'s mom abused a lot of the neighborhood kids as well.

There is more & more mounting evidence that there is no such thing as MPD. Its a condition that hysterics like to assume applies to them as it makes them feel important & special & certain unscrupulous therapists use the MPD diagnosis as a bandaid to fix much more complicated conditions. It IS VERY IMPORTANT that the fraud of MPD is exposed as it is NOT the proper treatment for the patient. The patient never really recovers as was the case with Miss Ardell--notice how she NEVER left the side of her doctor for the rest of her life. That is NOT a healthy recovery. Junk science is junk no matter how anyone tries to dress it up...plus you'll notice that with junk science there's ALWAYS someone collecting a LOT of $$ from it! Like the dead & buried Dr Wilbur who made a small fortune from the book's profits & went on to be a highly paid lecturer on the bunk "disorder" she helped popularize.

As to why Mrs Ardell wasn't arrested--well kids just didn't know the report those types of things back then. They were embarassed & afraid & didn;t have programs in schools like we have now that teach kids to speak up when touched inappropriatley by an adult. Remember we're talking the 1930s & 1940s...if you want some truly depressing & depraved examples of abuse read some of the transcripts of the trials of Catholic priests & their prey...& some of THAT abuse happened in the 1980s!!

ok, so she was truly abused by her mother, and ALL the accounts of abuse--all the horrific situations described in the book--are true?
her shrink did not abuse her in the way her mother did, correct?
if all this is correct, then what is the big deal? Yes, the mother did abuse many kids in the neighborhood and i am extremely surprised she never got caught. She sexually abused them. i am very glad that this shrink brought the truth on this psychopath to light. Why do you disapprove of her so when she is the one responsible for making the public aware of this shit?

so you think MPD is a sham, ok, so what? who gives a fuck? when you go to therapy, you don't go to discuss your disorder every single time. you as a client are not even suppose to label yourself --a disorder is dialogue for clinicians. If you are so educated on the "mounting evidence of it's nonexistence" then why the hell don't you know that MPD is now DID? in that case, yes MPD does not exist because it has been studied more thoroughly thus is renamed. and it is a true disorder, and a very good friend of mine has it. If you disagree with the reality of the disorder, i want to see what proof you have disproving it's existence, because their is much proof proving its existence. If you want to trivialize someone's health condition because you think their disorder doesn't exist, then whatever. i think that is a crass and asshole approach, and most importantly it doesn't do anything meaningful but make you out to be an asshole because there is more to someone than the disorder they have.

This disturbs me how you find the issue of MPD more important to talk about then the abuse this person suffered. People handle their abuse in varieties of ways, from mood swings to switches in personality. What the hell is the big deal if she had MPD? Her disorder is a fucking moot point. The book would be a book regardless of her disorder...the book was about a powerful account of child abuse, not about someone who happened to have MPD.
she had it as a result of abuse that the public as a whole needs to be aware of, and that was the point of the book.
so now you are going to trivialize sybil's account, as if it wasn't "abusive" enough despite the fact that EVERY ACCOUNT OF CHILD ABUSE LISTED IN THE BOOK REALLY HAPPENED TO HER, by comparing to the pedophile priest's victims? What the hell are you trying to prove here? All child abuse is horrible, and all of it should be made public. None of it should be trivialized. Just because Sybil had a shrink, and the priest's victimsm didn't, that guided her through expressing her abuse does not mean her abuse was any less real. And for the record, i don't know of any account of abuse that was as bad as Sybil's in terms of torture, and i've never seen her accounts even be compared. Again, with the sexual and physical torture she received as a toddler, i am amazed she made it out alive. I get angry just thinking about it. her mother, grr, how people get away with this shit....the statute of limitations for child abuse should never have an expiration.

my reading comprehension is just ducky, so curb your enthusiasm for preaching against that one, aight.

i saw that you were minimizing the abuse, and i pointed it out twice. the mentioning of the priests is a fine example.
why do you think she was misdiagnosed? do you fail to realize that in most abuse cases, the individual branches out in only a couple of ways? Conservatively speaking, one way being through depression and isolation, the other in delusional and mood-swinging behavior, such as multiple personalities or, as the more correct term is, dissassociation from one's identity. She obvviously had a disorder of some sort from her experiences. Her experiences leave no margin of doubt that MPD/DID was her disorder. So what are you so surprised by, and befuddled by? MPD has prevailed as a true disorder since then, and has been studied even more thoroughly to see the DID is the more correct title for such symptons. There has been no naysaying about removing it from the DSM. It is very hard to diagnose, just as any personality disorder is, so it's not a common disorder to begin with. So what the hell is the big deal about it with you?

I don't see where her shrink failed her, because there is no proof that she instilled the disorder in her patient. Considering how hard disorders are to diagnose to begin with, instilling one on somebody would be very uncommon and difficult, regardless of how impressionable the patient it. Even if it was a combination between her and the patient, and together they formed the disorder, i still don't see what the problem is. When you go to therapy they treat more than your disorder, your disorder does not make up the entirety of you. The sessions are not about your personalities, they are about how you cope with your symptons and your life and the people in your life, and so forth. I think your information--and ive seen it before about the sybil drama- is based on a huge misconception of what therapy is like, similar to how people think that Freudian therapy and Freudian thought is common in therapy clinics when it is so, so not.

I believe that DID is real disorder and I believe that it's possible Sybil had this disorder.

I also know that pop psychiatrists irresponsibly diagnosis people as having DID, when the reality is that the majority of pschological trauma these people has suffered is at the hands of their shrink.

If your interested in accounts of SRA and DID/MPD, repressed memory etc. I reccomend the following books.

"Suffer the Child" by Judith Spencer. Pretty much a direct rip off Sybil. I'm sure it convinced a lot of people that they were the victims of child abuse and and suffered from DID, while making Dr, Spencer a wealthy woman.

"Satan's High Priest" also by Judith Spencer Another irresponsible mass diagnosis of DID. If you believe the accounts in this book than you'd have to believe that the entire state of Alabama is suffering from DID, compartmentalization, depersonalization etc.

"Michelle Remembers" by Michelle Smith and Dr. Lawrence Pazder. This book started the Satanic panic in America. It's an interesting book. It illustrates how real false memory implantation is. Pazder studied a lot E. African rituals and using questionable therapy was able to convince Michelle that she was the victim of SRA that bore striking similarities to the rituals Pazder studied.

the "pop psychiatrist" is for one largely non-existent and thus the myth of that position is sensationalized. most clinicians don't irresponsibly diagnose personality disorders for they are the HARDEST disorder to diagnose. they typically take years of consistent therapy with a client to diagnose.

I have a theory that those books you listed are written by people that are not clinicians, that do not work directly with diagnosing anybody, thus in fact would NOT know the statistics of the disorder because that information is actually confidential. one's mental health record is NOT a matter of public record. if there was such an epidemic of misdiagnosis of the disorder, the clinicians would be under federal penalty and you would see lawsuits flying every which way and a removal of the disorder altogether from the DSM. the reality is, the disorder is NOT common, it never has been, and all sybil's story did was shed light on it and enable an opportunity for others to talk about a difficult to diagnose disorder surface into public awareness. As i said before, statistics cannot be verified as one's mental health record is not public record, nor is a clinic's record of how many of which disorder they treat.

CuriousCub said:

the "pop psychiatrist" is for one largely non-existent and thus the myth of that position is sensationalized.

Click to expand...

Turned on a TV or opened a magazine lately?

I'm not saying there's are massive "official" misdiagnosis of personality disorders, just a lot of "professionals" talking out their asses about them.

The reason lawsuits are not flying around is because the people (you're right they've probally never have encountered a real paitent/disorder.) that promote the idea that tons of people are suffering from personality disorders are full of crap and those kind of shock books (very well may include Sybil) are written very deceptively.

what people right now as we sit are promoting that 'tons of people are suffering from this disorder' if you feel you see this as a true epidemic? who are they? i want names and i want dates. i want to know where YOU are seeing their appearances. i know for a fact they are not real clinicians, because real clinicians cannot talk about the statistics of their clients that have the disorder. client confidientiality is a huge deal. nor can any of their coworkers talk about another's clients.
anyone can say whatever they want on tv, so fucking what? hardly any talking head on tv actually represents the issue. people talk about all sorts of shit on tv, such as wannabe-politicians. Why are you finding people on tv a reliable source since they aren't reliable nor are they the source of anything? i have not seen ANYTHING regarding the credibility or the diagnosis procedures of MPD since it has been changed to DID, btw.

i read slews of media daily, and i know how to question and judge credibility.

[let's not get personal. thanks]

[edited ad-hom]

I'm not gonna repost the same shit 5 times in a row. I think cydonorb is right, [edited ad-hom] I read with objectivity too, I don't believe the talking heads either, but lots of stupid people do.

I admit those books I listed are a little old, but not that old. Not as old as Sybil, they just happen to be more extreme crocks of shit. They're also not far from the shit spewed forth of Dr. Phil or Oprah.

I suggest you check out www.ritualabuse.net. There's 100's of members who think they are suffering from rare disorders like DID/MPD, depersonalization, etc. They got the ideas somewhere and these are strictly cases of people believing their "disorders" are a result of ritual abuse. (Something that has been proven time and time again to not be a reality.) There are a lot of people that feel they suffer from personality disorders from a multitutde of strange reasons.

I can tell you have a respect for clinical psychology and I ain't disrespecting the pros, I'm dissin the hacks!

If you still can't understand my point after this post then I'm done with this thread.

"
I suggest you check out www.ritualabuse.net. There's 100's of members who think they are suffering from rare disorders like DID/MPD, depersonalization, etc. They got the ideas somewhere and these are strictly cases of people believing their "disorders" are a result of ritual abuse. (Something that has been proven time and time again to not be a reality.) There are a lot of people that feel they suffer from personality disorders from a multitutde of strange reasons."

again, so WHAT if there are alot of people that think this way about themselves? what does that have to do with professional mental health care? therapy blackmail and false diagnosis' are NOT NOR EVER HAVE BEEN common in the U.S. people, like the talking heads, can think any way they want to. As i said, a member-base like that, especially on the damn internet, is NOT credible information to judge ANYTHING upon. For starters, if they had such credible reports, they would be clinically and legally recognized, and they would be capable of challenging the status quo of mental health care. For such a massive amount of people, they sure don't have the strength in numbers thing going on for them. 8)we have an over-active over-stimulated society and sites like that are a mere product of the said environment. You want to see reality? join a fucking therapy group at a clinic for such disorders, and you can see how everything you and your counterpart are stating about the disorder are major misconceptions. Better yet, train to be a therapist or something similar and get a first hand account and see how bad your tabloid fallacies of modern day mental health care will blow up in your face.

my knowledge does not come from having a respect for this stuff, it comes from actual facts about it. i know where to get and verify my facts, and it doesn't start and end with a sensationalism-based tabloid.

So "Sybil" is a credible and verified account of DID? Why is that? You're doing the same thing the people at ritualabuse.net and in the tabloids are doing. Just with a more "educated" approach.

You haven't offered anything other than your own opinions and interpretations of Sybil to explain why you feel Sybil really did suffer from DID or that her therapist wasn't the one who instilled these ideas in her.

i never said it was that. i am explaining that you guys obviously are not aware of the reality of MPD/DID. you are only aware of it in relation to tabloid fodder and sybil. i am aware of it in a very broad informed scope and thus can relate Sybil's account to the reality of the disorder. I don't see her account as far-fetched, in other words, as you all do.

i told you if you want more in terms of an offering, GO TO A FUCKING THERAPIST OR THERAPY GROUP AND HEAR IT FROM REALLY CREDIBLE SOURCES, aight?! i unlike some people here don't take stupid liberties by making baseless claims that the entirety of a disorder is a fraud, and i unlike some people here refer you to the REAL sources to take up such an argument. You can start off by studying some peer-review journals if you're too intimidated to meet the horse's mouth.

please keep things reasonably civil. having differing opinions doesn't mean you should abuse each other (however frustrated you might be ).

--

so, how much does this affect your opinion of the film itself? is a movie passed as a true story less valid when it's not actually true. or does the essentially fictionalised drama of the film more than make up for it anyway?

tbh, i still think the film is entirely worthy of commendation - scripted very well, and some amazing acting. it's disappointing to hear such news, but the movie still stands on its own two feet, imo.