From: hound23x@gmail.com   
      
   The Sybil Hoax   
   John Hayward  | Monday Oct 17, 2011 3:25 PM   
      
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   Here's a news item that will carry the most weight for readers old enough to   
   remember the Seventies: "Sybil" was a total fraud.   
      
      
   The "Sybil" story exploded into the public eye through a massive bestseller,   
   good for almost seven million copies.  It was serialized in newspapers, and   
   made into an award-winning TV miniseries with Sally Field and Joanne   
   Woodward.  If you were a kid in    
   the early 70s, this was the book everybody's mom had on her nightstand.  I   
   recall being especially disturbed by one of the paperback covers as a child,   
   because I thought it literally depicted the events of the book, and I thought   
   having your head sliced    
   into sixteen pieces would be very painful.   
      
      
      
   "Sybil" was the supposedly true story of a girl whose horribly traumatic   
   childhood caused her to manifest sixteen different personalities.  Interviews   
   with her were like demonic exorcisms, except the psychologist was taking on   
   sixteen different demons at    
   once, or maybe one demon with really potent multi-tasking capabilities.  Her   
   "real-life" drama, filled with lurid details of abuse, fit neatly into the   
   nightmare-child vibe that illuminated so much of the decade's pop fiction.  A   
   lot of unholy, unhinged,    
   and undead little girls leered from paperback shelves in those days.   
      
   In Sunday's New York Post, Kyle Smith reviewed a "darkly absurd" new book   
   called "Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple   
   Personality Case," which reveals the whole story was cooked up by a somewhat   
   disturbed young woman named    
   Shirley Mason, an enterprising psychiatrist with a well-stocked medicine   
   cabinet, and a trashy journalist:   
      
   As a student in New York City in the 1950s, [Shirley] met a Park Avenue   
   therapist named Cornelia "Connie" Wilbur. The two women adored each other even   
   as Connie gradually got Shirley hooked on a series of "therapeutic" drugs,   
   many of them new and    
   seemingly wondrous, including Seconal, Demerol, Edrisal and Daprisal. (The   
   last two were so addictive that they were soon banned.) Connie also strongly   
   believed in giving patients Pentathol, which invariably got them blabbing,   
   sometimes about fantasies    
   that could not possibly have occurred. Still, the drug was widely believed to   
   be a "truth serum."   
      
   One day, Shirley started talking about blackouts in which, she claimed, she   
   became others with various names and personalities -- Peggy Lou, Peggy Ann,   
   Vicky, etc.   
      
   Fascinated, Connie offered, "Would you like to earn some money?" She suggested   
   that her patient could be the subject of a book. Connie offered to pay   
   Shirley's medical-school tuition and living expenses.   
      
   The personality split was a lie, Shirley confessed in a five-page 1958 letter   
   that sits in the archives at John Jay. She said she was "none of the things I   
   have pretended to be."   
      
   Shirley continued, "I do not have any multiple personalities ... I do not even   
   have a 'double' ... I am all of them. I have essentially been lying ... as   
   trying to show you I felt I needed help ... Quite thrilling. Got me a lot of   
   attention."   
      
   Shirley's therapist wasn't about to let her meal ticket pull the brakes on a   
   roller-coaster ride to fame and fortune:   
      
   The therapist, who was already talking up her prize patient at psychiatry   
   conferences, dismissed the letter as "resistance" and pushed on with the drugs   
   and the therapy -- this time, five days a week. Soon Shirley was again putting   
   on a split-personality    
   show in Connie's office. No one else except her roommate was ever treated to   
   these performances.   
      
   The two fabulists joined forces with journalist Flora Schreiber, a   
   self-aggrandizing spinster whose trade was in trashy, made-up "true" stories   
   for magazines like Cosmopolitan.   
      
   They cudgeled enough juicy material out of Shirley to get "Sybil,   
   Incorporated," as they called it, off the ground.  The rest was history.    
      
   This isn't just a footnote to a bit of 70s trivia, like documenting how an   
   early outbreak of analog viral marketing led so many people to believe "The   
   Amityville Horror" was real.  The "Sybil" hoax exerted a profound influence on   
   pop psychology:   
      
   Soon, "multiple personality disorder," or MPD, became an officially recognized   
   diagnosis, and a handful of cases exploded into 40,000 reported sufferers,   
   nearly all of them female. The repressed-memory industry was born. Only in the   
   last decade or so has    
   the psychiatric profession begun to question the validity of Sybilmania.   
      
   There are many interesting angles to this story.  The Seventies had an   
   obsession with psychodrama and mysticism that endures, in somewhat diluted   
   form, through our modern Oprahfied therapeutic culture.  The study of real   
   mental illness, a very serious    
   topic in need of constant attention from dedicated scientists, has been sadly   
   distorted by these pop-culture obsessions.    
      
   The remarkable durability of hoaxes from the pre-Internet age is an   
   interesting contrast with the high-speed viral propagation and demise of   
   misinformation that we've become accustomed to.  You've got to wonder how long   
   "Sybil, Inc." could have lasted    
   amid roiling Internet thunderclouds of true and false data, an environment   
   that leads modern information consumers to simultaneously believe and doubt   
   virtually everything.  Before the advent of the Internet, high-profile movies   
   and tended to put public    
   doubts to rest.  By the time it was widely accepted that "Roots" was a fraud,   
   Alex Haley had lived and died, his book and miniseries were beloved classics,   
   and nobody really wanted to sully their rosy memories with inconvenient truth.   
      
   It's interesting to note how abruptly "settled" narratives can become   
   unsettled.  There is a modern horror story to be found in the tale of Shirley   
   Mason, who found herself captured by a corrupt authority figure who had the   
   conclusion she wanted, and set    
   out to protect her supporting "facts" by scrubbing away "resistance."     
      
      
      
      
      
      
   http://humanevents.com/2011/10/17/the-sybil-hoax/   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)