Saturday, August 1, 2015

Experience: Television Movie that Caused Hysteria Found Fake

     One of the most foolish and devastating episodes of social hysteria in America was the rise of "multiple personality disorder" in the era between, roughly, 1980 and 2000. Before 1980, only a handful of cases had ever existed world-wide, and the "multiples" came in pairs. In the 1950s, "The Three Faces of Eve" added one more personality to the mix. MPD then languished, as a rare psychiatric curiosity, until "Sybil" was published in 1973. The title patient produced 16 personalities before she was through, and became a national phenomenon.  Flora Rheta Schreiber's book sold more than six million copies, and 40 million Americans watched the 1976 two-part television special starring Joanne Woodward and Sally Field was seen by an estimated fifth of all American Households on television.  The movie was depicted as a true story.  It is now known to be a fake.


The famous patient who inspired the panic was more the victim of her psychiatrist than of mental illness....
        If Helen's face launched a thousand ships, Sybil's faces launched tens of thousands. In her wake, people began coming out of therapy claiming that they had dozens, even hundreds, of "alters"—human, animal, mechanical and vegetable. By 1980 so many psychiatrists had begun looking for sensational cases of MPD in their own troubled clients—and finding them—that for the first time it became an official diagnosis in the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders." MPD was a growth industry; eminent hospitals, notably Rush Presbyterian in Chicago, opened MPD treatment centers. By the mid-1990s, according to some estimates, as many as 40,000 cases had been reported.
       Yet Sybil's story, which started it all, was a complete fabrication. Sybil, whose real name was Shirley Mason, did not have a childhood trauma that caused her personality to fragment, and her "personalities" were largely generated in response to pressures, subtle and coercive, by her psychiatrist, Cornelia (Connnie) Wilbur, whom she wanted desperately to please.
       The true story of Sybil has found its ideal historian in Debbie Nathan, whose earlier book, "Satan's Silence" (with Michael Snedeker), debunked the "ritual sex abuse" panic that swept across the United States at the same time as MPD. Ms. Nathan's indefatigable detective work in "Sybil Exposed" has produced a major contribution to the history of psychiatric fads and the social manufacture of mental disorders. This is the book that should be a made-for-TV movie.
       Sybil was a fake, but not entirely a fraud. Self-deception, Ms. Nathan shows, was the motivation for all three principals involved in the creation of her persona: the patient, the psychiatrist and the writer. Each faced a choice when confronted with the evidence that Sybil was not a multiple personality: Accept the truth or press forward with a story they knew was a lie. Ms. Nathan deftly shows how emotional dependence, grandiose ambition and financial incentives from need to greed tilted their decisions.
      Ms. Nathan begins with the early lives of the three: Shirley, who grew up in a tiny Minnesota town, the only child of Seventh-day Adventists; Connie, who saw wealth and professional glory if she could get a good story out of her distressed, dependent patient; and Flora, a New York magazine writer whom Connie commissioned to turn Shirley's story into a book with a "happy ending." Each of these women, who came of age in the 1920s and 1930s, yearned to break out of the confines imposed on them by religion, region or gender: Shirley, to become an art teacher; Connie, to prove wrong her father's claim that she was "too stupid" to be a doctor or chemist; Flora, to become a great writer.
       Shirley, who suffered from various physical and emotional ailments for most of her life, began psychoanalytic treatment with Connie in 1955. Before long, the two women struck a deal: Shirley would allow Connie to publish her story of being a multiple personality, and the cost of her treatment would be taken out of the book's royalties.
       Connie began injecting Shirley with sodium pentothal (falsely called "truth serum," more properly "fanciful imaginings serum") and recording whatever Shirley said under its influence.  Most of it was dreamlike garble, with an occasional alarming "memory" thrown in: Once Shirley recalled being forced onto a table, knocked out by medication and seeing a man looming above her. Connie assumed Shirley had been raped.  Much later Shirley admitted it was a memory of her tonsillectomy.
       Connie turned Shirley into an addict, giving her nearly a dozen drugs, including barbiturates, tranquilizers and anti-psychotics (such as Thorazine). Even with this "help," Ms. Nathan writes, "Shirley's new 'trauma' memories were pathetically trivial." But if Shirley couldn't produce a traumatic secret that was the reason for all her alters, there could be no resolution and no book. And so, in 1958, after four years of therapy, Connie simply withheld the sodium pentothal that Shirley was addicted to. Shirley was devastated. She wrote a long letter to Connie, admitting she was "none of the things I have pretended to be . . . I do not have any multiple personalities. . . . I do not even have a 'double.' . . . I am all of them. I have been essentially lying."
       Connie had a choice. She could give up the most important case of her career, or she could justify her misdiagnosis and failure to help her patient in familiar psychoanalytic jargon. Shirley, she explained, was experiencing massive denial and resistance—evidence that the therapy was working. Now Shirley had a choice. She could continue being a "multiple" and keep Connie and drugs in her life, or leave therapy, owing Connie a fortune she could never repay. Shirley went home and wrote Connie a second letter. It must have been another alter, she said, who wrote the first one. Connie upped Shirley's sessions to five a week and resumed the sodium pentothal.
       In 1965, almost 11 years after their first psychotherapy session, Connie announced that she was moving to a new job in West Virginia. She told Shirley that she was welcome to come along, but she would have to integrate her multiple personalities right away so that the book could finally be written. Shirley immediately produced a new identity as herself and never again dissociated.
       Flora faced her own choice about Sybil after finally getting a contract from a small publisher in 1969. Doing some investigative legwork for the book, she discovered huge discrepancies between Shirley's memories and what Shirley herself had written in her diaries at the time the alleged events occurred. If her mother went on lesbian orgies in the woods and defecated on neighbors' lawns, the young Shirley didn't say a word about it. No one in Shirley's hometown corroborated Shirley's memories, nor did her childhood medical records. And then Flora found Shirley's letter saying that she never had multiple personalities. Flora had to decide whether to give up this luscious project, which she was already fantasizing might be as successful as Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood," or to believe Connie and Shirley.
       When Ms. Nathan, as part of her own investigation, persuaded forensic experts to examine some of Shirley's key diaries, she learned that entries marked "1941" were written in ballpoint pen, which was not used in the United States until 1945. Ms. Nathan suspects Shirley wrote these entries years later, probably at Connie's urging, to support the MPD story and persuade Flora to stay with the project.
       What, then, did Sybil suffer from? Is MPD "real"? Yes and no. MPD is what some psychiatrists call a culture-bound syndrome, a culturally permitted expression of extreme psychological distress, similar to an ataque de nervios (an episode of screaming, crying and agitation) in Hispanic cultures and "running amok" in Malaysia. As Ms. Nathan suggests, "the Sybil craze erupted during a fractured moment in history, when women pushed to go forward, even as the culture pulled back in fear."
       The disorder seems real to clinicians and their patients who believe in it, but it results from suggestion, sometimes bordering on intimidation, by clinicians. One eminent MPD proponent actually told his colleagues that they might need to interview a patient for up to eight hours nonstop before an alter appears! Once that happens, the therapist rewards the patient with attention and praise for revealing more and more personalities, as Connie did to Sybil.
       Flora Rheta Schreiber died in 1988, age 72. Her papers, including Sybil's therapy records, went to John Jay College in New York City, where they were sealed from public view to protect Sybil's identity. A decade later, when two diligent investigators discovered her real name, the box was opened to the public.
       Cornelia Wilbur died in 1992, age 86, when MPD was at its height of popularity with her colleagues. Her executor, a former patient, destroyed her papers.
       Shirley Mason died in 1998, at age 75, alone with a framed photo of Connie and the doll collection she had kept with her since childhood. In exchange for a life in Connie's orbit, she gave up close friends, enjoyable work as an art teacher and an offer of marriage to a man she loved.
       The MPD bubble burst in 1995, when several patients sued a St. Paul psychiatrist for malpractice, alleging that she had used punitive methods to induce their "multiple personalities." They were awarded millions of dollars, and the psychiatrist eventually lost her medical license. More malpractice suits followed; hospitals closed their inpatient MPD units; and the epidemic subsided. Psychological researchers went on to scientifically discredit virtually all the assumptions underlying MPD, such as the belief that trauma is commonly repressed and causes "dissociation" of personality. Harvard psychologist Richard McNally calls this notion "a piece of psychiatric folklore devoid of convincing empirical support."
       Yet the promulgators of MPD do not seem to have learned anything. They changed the label to "Dissociative Identity Disorder," but a skunk by any other name is still a skunk. The International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation continues to give its Cornelia B. Wilbur Award "for outstanding clinical contributions to the treatment of dissociative disorders." When Ms. Nathan told the society's president, Kathy Steele, about "the extensive evidence of Connie's ignorance, arrogance, and ethical misconduct" that she had unearthed, that Sybil was "a performance based on fiction," Ms. Steele replied: "So what? I don't know what difference it makes."

       What difference does a correct diagnosis make? At a professional meeting in 1989, in response to a question from the audience about how Sybil was doing, Connie announced casually that Shirley suffered from pernicious anemia, a disease that causes an inability to process vitamin B-12.   Discovering that Connie knew this fact about her patient may be Ms. Nathan's greatest scoop, for symptoms of pernicious anemia include just about everything that plagued Shirley Mason throughout her life:  fatigue, social withdrawal, anxiety, hallucinations, muscle pains, confusion about identity, distorted memories and changes in personality.   No one in Connie's audience of psychiatrists, Ms. Nathan writes, took note.

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—Ms. Tavris is the author, with Elliot Aronson, of "Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)."

Published  October 29, 2011
Article Originally found 4/4/16 at:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204524604576609350972680560

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WARNING
  If you are seeking help for personal struggles and a therapist, counselor or friend says that "recovering childhood memories can help you get better" then IMMEDIATELY get up from your chair (or off the couch), run to the door, open it and flee. Hundreds of thousands have lost families, years of productive living and squandered immense wealth with tragedy inducing therapy that produces horrid false memories, splinters families, isolates the client and is documented to cause decline in mental health.
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Location: Walla Walla, WA, USA

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