So says Debbie Nathan in her book debunking the whole “multiple personality” hysteria that erupted from Flora Rheta Schreiber’s book. Shirley Ardell Mason and her mother Mattie (called Sybil and Hattie) both showed symptons of the genetic disorder, but Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, looking for fame, turned her into a drug addict, treated her for free, and employed other unprofessional and unethical actions for her personal fame and financial gain.
Mason spent the last years of her life living as a finacially strapped recluse.
The book is good reading, and shows how a woman with a physical disease was totally failed by the psychiatric view of pushing medicine as a “cure.”
I don’t know about the EEGs, but just remember that Schreiber’s “Sybil” is fiction. Its roots are based on real people, but in no way should it be construed a biography.
Never mind Dr. Wilbur looking for fame, Schreiber was also looking to, IIRC, breaking out of the newspaper business and wanted something “sensational” to write about.
I read the book when it first came out. Sybil’s story has always raised my eyebrow, but I never could completely debunk it because DID does exist, and psychiatry was not as sophisticated then as it is now. The real Sybil had her own garden-variety neuroses, however, but nothing to the extent that would warrant the treatment she underwent with Wilbur.
I thought the Sybil story was debunked long ago. As for EEGs, I’d be surprised if meaningful results were found that way. EEG results should differ under different conditions, they were used at the time to find anomalies, not for an MPD diagnosis, and even now I’d be suspicious of their use for that purpose.
Pernicious anemia is a reasonable explanation for such behavior. I know someone who suffered through that, made worse by misdiagnosis and bad treatment. It certainly seemed to make her act like someone with MPD, and the influence of a Freudian psychiatrist could certainly turn that into the reported MPD symptoms. It’s tragic that ‘Sybil’ never received proper treatment for her disorders.
Read the amazon reviews of Sybil Exposed and you’ll find a lot of people who vehemently disagree that the Sybil story has been debunked even now (which doesn’t mean it hasn’t been).
I read the book last month. For the most part - especially with regard to Mason - it’s very sad. She had a few therapy sessions with Dr. Wilbur earlier in her life and was really helped by them. She had some emotional problems and undiagnosed anemia, but she was doing pretty well. Then she met Wilbur again in New York and pretty soon she was a full time therapy subject who couldn’t hold down a job because she was constantly under analysis and was addicted to barbiturates. Wilbur’s therapeutic approach was to give her patients titanic doses of drugs and assume that whatever they said while blitzed was the truth and the cause of their problems. She had no idea how to do therapy while not giving suggestions to her patients. At the same time it’s possible to feel pity for Wilbur and Schreiber as well. Wilbur got into psychiatry at a time when women weren’t really welcome in the profession and her own father discouraged her from going into medicine because he felt she wasn’t smart enough. Schreiber was a desperately lonely person. Mason suffered the most by far even though she has some culpability, too. But it’s possible to think it’s too bad these three people found each other.
Nathan writes that an individual can have very different EEG readings at different times for a ton of different reasons, so this proves nothing at all. But it wasn’t understood at the time.
It was sold as nonfiction and as a biography. Schreiber made up a great deal and her research was sloppy, too. I thought this was funny: do you know who Nathan credits with suggesting to Schreiber the idea of just making up stuff to get a more interesting story? Dick Morris’ mother.
Unrelated (but not totally), Martine Bartlett the actress who played Sybil’s mother became a drifter later in life, moving from one cheap motel to another (where she was found when she died in 2006 in Tempe, AZ).
Well, hell, I have pernicious anemia. All it’s gotten me is a big jar of B-12 vitamins I have to take every morning. No nifty crazy-mental side-effects at all. I wouldn’t even know I had it, except they caught it as part of the seventy-billion lab tests I had when I went off to the diabetes experts to figure out why the local docs couldn’t fix me.
I’m definitely gonna start acting weirder and blame it on the PA.
She scared the $%*@#$fuck out of me when I was a kid, the character being pure evil and looking like a demented Barbara Bush (pic).
When I saw it decades later as a late night cable movie I had to laugh because, intentionally or un, it was also campy. I kept imagine Gilda Radner’s spastic kid character as Sybil so when her evil mom would knock her down and say “Have-a-nice-trip-see-you-next-fall!” it was almost macabre performance art masterpiece.
Shirley Mason’s pernicious anemia was pretty much untreated, of course, which is why she had the symptoms that were misdiagnosed and exaggerated into the basis for the multiple personality syndrome diagnosis. One of the best pieces of evidence for Nathan’s theory is the fact that early in her life, Shirley Mason received large injections of… was it hogs’ liver extract? Something that was high in B-12. And when that happened her symptoms (depression, forgetfulness) got better. But I think the injections stopped when she was young and nobody else put two and two together until very late in her life. Nathan also makes a pretty good case that Shirley’s mother Mattie also had the condition, since she also had periodic spells of depression and total lethargy, and her hair went prematurely white.
The recapping of the three major players and the debunking of the multiple personality stuff takes up most of the book, but Nathan also talks about why she believes people were so attracted to this story and why there was a major fad for multiple-personality diagnoses after the publication of Schreiber’s book. I think her research here is a little thin but I don’t disagree with what she says. She does make a rather frightening sketch of how multiple personality went from something that was practically unheard of in the history of medicine to an enormous fad in psychiatry - Dr. Wilbur pushed the syndrome very, very hard and opened a sort of “free range” hospital that sounds like it must’ve been a horrible nightmare for patients - to something that pretty much didn’t exist anymore.
It’s really disgusting that Sybil’s story led to the whole Satanist witch hunt of the 1980’s. Suddenly thousands of people were claiming to have been victims of Satanistic rituals and developed multiple personalities. And, guess what…If you don’t remember this happening to you, it proves you have repressed the memories, so it did. It was mental illness run amuk, and lives were destroyed. Innocent people were accused of hideous things, some going to jail based solely on false memories being recovered.
