What ever became of the girl with 16 personalities. I assume she must be dead by now. I also heard most of what was in the book was made up.
Shirley Ardell Mason, an art teacher from Lexington, Ky, was “Sybil.”
Here’s an article on her life and death from the Detroit Free Press: http://www.freep.com/news/nw/qsybil23.htm
A undated Reuters news article, reproduced on this web page http://www.samsloan.com/sybil.htm directly questions the truth of the story.
[[SAN FRANCISCO – “Sybil,” the young woman whose tale of having 16 identities helped bring multiple-personality disorder to the attention of the public, may have had just a single troubled personality, a psychologist says in a new report.
The psychologist, Robert Rieber of John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, says newly found 25-year-old tape recordings show that Sybil’s personalities may have been implanted by her own psychiatrist, eager to break ground in the research of multiple personality disorder.
Presenting his analysis at the American Psychological Association meeting last weekend, he said that he found conversations between Sybil’s psychiatrist, Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, and Flora Schreiber, the author of the best-selling 1973 book “Sybil,” that document “the fraudulent construction of a multiple personality.” Miss Schreiber, who died in 1988, taught English and speech at John Jay and was a friend of Rieber.
“Sybil is a phony multiple-personality case at best,” Rieber said in an interview. ]]
Here’s another news story from another website about the case: http://www.asarian.org/~astraea/household/sybilbogus.html
Of course, just because this is published on a website doesn’t necessarily make it so, but it does make you wonder, doesn’t it?
BTW, I found all this information in about five minutes of web searching using the Google search engine. http://www.google.com/ . Web searches can be fascinating and informative; don’t let me have all the fun!
your humble TubaDiva
Thank you for you help. I will try your search engine. I tried the usual ones Yahoo, Excite, etc & came up way short.
Our humble TubaDiva is not aware her “lucid” personality posted this. I’ll send her the link. 