Dr. Wilbur it’s getting worse. Who does those drawings?
You do – but you do them as other people, do you understand?
You do them as other parts of yourself who are still children.
No, I don’t.
In 1976, millions of Americans watched “Sybil” -- a TV movie
based on a blockbuster book of the same name.
Sybil really introduced the country to the notion that someone could have multiple personalities.
Said to have 16 distinct personalities, Sybil had a story that was emotional and terrifying.
How did you figure out that you had this multiple personality disorder?
So, how did a rarely diagnosed psychological disorder turn into a cultural phenomenon?
Sometimes the media is the brilliant hysteric in the mix and that can be the problem.
In the early 1950’s, two doctors stunned the public with a patient they called “Eve.”
Eve was a housewife from Georgia who appeared to have three distinct personalities.
Can I speak with Eve Black now?
Sure.
Eve Black?
I feel good.
No psychiatrist in the United States in 1954 was unaware of this case.
Including Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, and a patient she was treating in the fall of 1954
named Shirley Mason, who would later become known as Sybil.
At the time, Mason was a graduate student living in New York.
But she had severe emotional problems that had long seemed to be taking over her life.
Dr. David Spiegel’s father would see Mason when Dr. Wilbur was on vacation.
What we know is there was something seriously wrong.
She didn’t have a normal life despite being so intelligent.
Mason had met Dr. Wilbur nine years earlier in Omaha, Nebraska.
Even then, Dr. Wilbur had been interested in multiple personality disorder.
And she even recommended that Shirley read a classic book about Multiple Personality.
Then, several months after their therapy began in New York,
Mason arrived at Wilbur's office acting different.
She came in seeming very little girl-ish.
And she said something like, “Hi. I'm Peggy."
To explore this further, Wilbur began an aggressive treatment
similar to one she had used as a young psychiatrist.
Back then, she would delve into the unconscious mind by injecting mentally ill patients
with hypnotic drugs, or so called "truth serums."
Now, she used this technique on Mason.
Dr. Wilbur ultimately identified 16 distinct personalities.
There was a little girl who called herself “The Grandmother.”
She had a little boy personality named Mike.
There was Vicky.
And she had another one named Peggy Ann.
And Wilbur had a strong suspicion about what caused Mason’s other selves.
Dr. Wilbur was looking for trauma.
She had this idea that something terrible had made Shirley split.
She didn’t really know what it was.
So, Shirley would be questioned pretty ruthlessly about things that her mother might have done
to her, with a lot of specific suggestions by Dr. Wilbur.
And what she "remembered" was her mother tying her up,
sticking implements up her genitals - all kinds of really terrible things.
Rather than publishing her findings in a scientific journal, Dr. Wilbur approached a journalist
friend, Flora Schreiber, about the possibility of writing a mass-market book.
She agreed, but only if Mason’s personalities had merged.
Three years later, Schreiber got a call from Shirley Mason.
Flora Schreiber came over to Shirley's apartment, and she’d had some sort of a fit.
She fell down writhing and then jumped up and jumped all over the place.
And after that she was integrated.
That’s the way it was described by Flora Schreiber.
She was integrated.
Their book, “Sybil,” sold more than 6 million copies.
Will you call me sweetie?
And the TV movie that followed was a smash hit, turning the story into a sensation.
My next two guests have an amazing and frightening story.
Will you welcome please, Dr. Cornelia Wilbur and Professor Flora Schreiber.
This is just one of the most fascinating cases I guess that’s ever happened
in, uh, psychiatric history.
Do you have a feeling that there are a lot more of them that never come to light?
Yes, I do. The doctors don’t recognize it.
Has anybody suggested that this is a hoax?
Oh, we’ve had - "hoax" has been breathed down our necks
by various people at various stages of this project.
Actually, it isn’t a hoax.
Tragically, it isn’t a hoax.
It would be much better for Sybil, and possibly for all of us, if it were,
because this was dreadful to bear.
This is true.
It doesn’t sound plausible.
It doesn’t sound possible, but true it is.
Before "Sybil," Multiple Personality Disorder was so rare that only a hundred cases
had ever been reported in the medical literature.
Less than a decade later, in 1980, the American Psychiatric Association
officially recognized the disorder.
And the number of patients diagnosed rose into the thousands.
You really believe these are all distinct personalities - different?
Oh, without a doubt. You could see it.
Today we’re talking to people who have been diagnosed with Multiple Personality Disorder.
I’d like you to meet Kim.
She says she has at least 15 different personalities in her body.
Today, we’ll meet Ray Lynn.
A woman raising four kids while struggling with over 300 personalities inside her mind.
After the public fascination with this, entire hospital units were turned
into treatment centers for Multiple Personality Disorder.
Dr. Wilbur too would open her own treatment center.
These personalities are all perfectly whole, but they’re totally separate people.
I came in for depression, and I left with Multiple Personalities.
In the mid-80s, 29 year old Jeanette Bartha, who had suffered for years with clinical depression,
was also diagnosed with Multiple Personality Disorder by her psychiatrist.
It was probably our first or second session.
He asked me who he was talking to and I said, "I just feel like a boy."
I was wearing a boys' shirt and his response was, "Who am I talking to, what's your name?"
And it was very confusing and I didn't know what he meant, he just kept saying,
"What's your name, who am I talking to?"
So, I gave him the first name that popped into my mind and I said Danny.
Her psychiatrist conducted therapy sessions under hypnotic drugs.
Over time, Bartha says she came to believe that she not only had multiple personalities,
but that it stemmed from her parents abusing her as members of a satanic cult.
And I would get horribly upset.
Thinking that your parents horrifically abused you was very, very difficult.
And I’d take more medication in order to cope with that.
Bartha would spend six years in and out of mental hospitals.
Then, as she started exercising and cutting back on her medication,
she says she had a revelation.
All of the sudden, I said, “Oh my God.
Wait a minute.
This, this didn’t happen."
I just sunk to the floor, and I said, “What happened, what did I do?"
Bartha wasn’t the only one questioning her diagnosis and the trauma
she once believed had caused it.
In the 1990’s, lawsuits were filed by other MPD patients -- many who also linked their
disorder to recovered memories of satanic ritual abuse -- when they realized there was
little evidence that such abuse had actually occurred.
Many women who went into therapy and developed what are today called “false memories”
developed those around treatment for Multiple Personality Disorder.
The notion of hypnotizing people,
the notion of calling them by different names to label different aspects of their personality,
the notion of using sodium pentothal to get at repressed memories that otherwise would
be utterly inaccessible to their conscious mind - that has been so debunked, it’s radioactive,
even though at one time that was seen as a necessary way to promote healing.
Today, MPD is not an official diagnosis.
The American Psychiatric Association now calls it Dissociative Identity Disorder or DID.
The MPD thing had gotten to be such a lightning rod in the field as we move into the 1990s
and late 80s that it probably was better to make – give it a little more boring name perhaps.
Dr. David Spiegel of Stanford University, who headed up the committee that pushed for the
change, says that part of the reason was to clear up the public misconception that rose
from the name.
Multiple Personality carries with it the implication that they really have more than one personality;
that’s what the name says.
Dissociative Identity Disorder implies that the problem is fragmentation of identity,
not that you really are 12 people - that you have not more than one, but less than one personality.
He continues to study and treat the disorder.
The way to understand it in everyday life, you know, we’re different people when we’re
at a party, hopefully, than we are when we’re at work.
These individuals have trouble integrating those aspects.
But what about Shirley Mason?
Dr. Spiegel remembers that his father doubted she had multiple personalities
and that was nearly 60 years ago.
He referred to her as a brilliant hysteric.
He felt that Dr. Wilbur tended to pressure her to exaggerate
on the dissociation she already had. So, she was capable of it.
She was very hypnotizable.
Dr. Wilbur died in 1992, leaving Mason $25,000 in her will.
Not long before Mason’s death six years later,
she told a friend that “every word in the book was true.”
I think it’s important to look back at Sybil because it's important to understand which
stories are true and which are false, because in some cases, like this one, they’re not
just stories, they actually end up effecting law, affecting mental health,
affecting political decisions.
And the stuff that sounds the most dramatic and yet the most credible at the same time,
is probably the most dangerous.