FAMOUS PEOPLE WITH PERSONALITY DISORDERS TV

The book sold 6 million copies and, in 1976, was made into a TV movie. In 1973, Flora Rheta Schreiber published Sybil: The True Story of a Woman Possessed by 16 Separate Personalities. By now, says Nathan, Wilbur was too heavily invested in her patient to let her go. I have been lying in my pretense of them.' Wilbur dismissed the letter as Mason's attempt to avoid going deeper in her therapy. She wrote a letter to Wilbur admitting that she had been lying: 'I do not really have any multiple personalities,' she wrote. So she had the dilemma all journalists have nightmares about - what if my thesis turns out to be wrong as I do my research but it's too late?'ДЄt one point, Mason tried to set things straight. 'She was in the middle of writing the book. 'She already had a contract and she already had a deadline,' Nathan says. But if Schreiber had doubts, she suppressed them. And Schreiber seemed eager to pump up or even create drama where none existed. Memories of a traumatic tonsillectomy, for instance, morphed into a lurid story of abuse. Reading through Schreiber's papers, Nathan says it becomes obvious that the writer knew that Mason's story was not entirely true. Under the influence of drugs and hypnosis, the very suggestible Mason uncovered her many personalities. Wilbur began injecting Mason regularly with sodium pentothal, which was then being used to help people remember traumatic events that they had repressed. I think a better way to talk about what Shirley was doing was that she was acceding to a demand that she have this problem.' 'She had babies, she had little boys, she had teenage girls. 'Once she got this diagnosis she started generating more and more personalities,' Nathan says. She was eager to give her psychiatrist what she wanted. Mason became increasingly dependent on Wilbur for emotional and even financial support. She knew it was a sin to be angry, but people got angry so she got angry. Sylvia couldn't get angry because her mother wouldn't let her, but she got angry. that Sylvia couldn't stand up for herself and she had to stand up for her. She said, 'I'm Peggy,' and she proceeded to tell me about herself. Shirley started acting like she had a lot of people inside her.' Wilbur's office and she says, 'I'm not Shirley. 'Shirley feels after a short time, that she is not really getting the attention she needs from Dr. Connie Wilbur, and she knew that Wilbur had a special interest in multiple personality disorder. Mason became unusually attached to her psychiatrist, Dr. As a young woman she was emotionally unstable, and she decided to seek psychiatric help.

Shirley Mason, the real Sybil, grew up in the Midwest in a strict Seventh-day Adventist family. But in a new book, Sybil Exposed, writer Debbie Nathan argues that most of the story is based on a lie. Within a few years of its publication, reported cases of multiple personality disorder - now known as dissociative identity disorder - leapt from fewer than 100 to thousands.

The book was billed as the true story of a woman who suffered from multiple personality disorder. When Sybil first came out in 1973, not only did it shoot to the top of the best-seller lists - it manufactured a psychiatric phenomenon. Mason later admitted she had faked her multiple personalities. The book and subsequent film caused an enormous spike in reported cases of multiple personality disorder. Shirley Mason was the psychiatric patient whose life was portrayed in the 1973 book Sybil.

Famous people with personality disorders