Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case by Debbie Nathan

I purposely read these Sybil books back to back. While I knew the premise of Sybil, I wanted to read the book to know the differences before reading Sybil Exposed. I wanted all sides of the story before having all the walls torn down. I am glad I did. While I enjoy a good fiction novel, when I am reading non-fiction, I expect it to uphold the truth. I do not know what the truth is after reading Sybil Exposed; the only people who know that are Shirley Ardel Mason, Cornelia Wilbur, and Flora Schreiber. What I do know is that no matter what the truth is, these three women, most likely inadvertently, had a (mostly negative) impact on psychology, and DID (MPD originally) specifically, as well as women in the medical and journalistic fields.

(Source: Kelsey Darling)

In Sybil Exposed, Debbie Nathan delves into the lives of Shirley, Connie, and Flora and sets off to find out if the story behind Sybil, Shirley's story, is true, or a work of fiction. Through her intensive research, we learn the real past of Shirley and her parents. While her mother was a nervous woman, she was not violent, nor was she schizophrenic. At most, she suffered from pernicious anemia, which is an inborn lack of ability in some people to process vitamin B12. Symptoms include: tingling and numbness in the limbs, stomach pains, fatigue, constipation, difficulty concentrating or learning, depression, social withdrawal, anxiety, irritability, headaches, insomnia, moods swings, rapid heart beat, nausea, vomiting, severe weight loss, hallucinations, muscle pains, a tendency to walk into walls, confusion about identity, miscarriages, deadly stomach cancer, and hair gone prematurely white. These are all symptoms that Shirley and her mother, Mattie, suffered from, on different levels of severity (p. 220). You also learn that both Connie and Flora, while wanting to be mavericks in their fields, had had early failures that did more to set them back than push them forward.

When Shirley made her way into Connie's office, the original intent may have been for Connie to help Shirley; but their relationship quickly became codependent, and spanned many decades until Connie's death. When Flora was introduced into the mix to write the story, another level of dependency was added. While Connie had gained some fame in the psychology world, a book about a woman that she helped with sixteen personalities would bring her notoriety that she could only imagine. The same would happen for Flora, who had already made a name as writing fictitious non-fiction.

My honest opinion about all of this is this: I definitely believe that Shirley was sick; I believe that Connie's original goal was to help her; I believe that Connie wanted to help anyone who was mentally ill; I do not believe that any of this was originally entered into with bad or poor intentions. However, The relationship between Connie and Shirley was extremely unprofessional and broke many different rules between a psychiatrist and patient.

"Ethics rules were not so clearly codified for psychiatrists when Connie was treating Shirley. Even so, Connie most likely would have been disciplined if her colleagues had known she was giving a patient free treatment, clothes, a house pet, rent money, and even furnishings from the apartment where the patient's analysis was taking place. The psychiatry community would have also been shocked to know that part of Connie's treatment of Shirley involved her patient work for her.

The job involved secretarial duties, dog walking, and care for a family member. To do this work Shirley went into Connie's home at all hours, unannounced-she even had her own key....

Shirley often spent whole days in her doctor's orbit. Morning she walked the dogs. Early afternoons she went to libraries to do psychiatry research for Connie. Later she returned to Park Avenue to walk the dogs again. Then she had a psychoanalysis session that frequently lasted two or three hours. It would be nighttime before she got back to her own apartment....

The two women went for weekend jaunts. Connie often drove to Brooklyn to get her hair done, and she would take Shirley along....The women even went out of town together. For Labor Day weekend in 1962 the took Connie's car from New York to Michigan and back. When she returned, Shirley excitedly described how they'd 'stopped at a roadside table and had tomatoes, cookies, cake, rolls (we'd bought for sandwiches) and peaches.' The slept in a motel room with twin beds, she added. 'Doctor is fun to travel with.'

Connie know she was violating the rules of her profession. According to a transcript of one of their recorded therapy sessions, she told Shirley that their socializing was 'not good analytic technique.' But she didn't care: 'I'm willing to violate the rules for you,' she said." (pp. 124-126)

I could understand a small trip away for the sake of a breakthrough, or a questionable home visit if it means the patient is getting the help they need, but Connie broke more than a few small rules.

Flora also pushed the boundaries of journalistic integrity and helped push her name into the limelight.

"In this piece, the troubled characters were a public relations executive named Henrietta; her husband, Stephen; and their daughter, Ellen, who had repeatedly been hospitalized for her paranoid fears that, for instance, the family's phone was tapped. In family therapy, according to Flora's article, Henrietta learned she was 'over adequate' as a wife and mother. Stephen realized he was 'passive.' As for Ellen, she suffered from 'overattachement to her mother.' These problems had rendered her insane. The family's therapist summed things up by asking, rhetorically, 'Is the patient schizophrenic, or is the family schizophrenic?'

That therapist was supposedly Dr. Murray Bowen. But Henrietta, Stephen, and Ellen probably never existed. Among Flora's papers at Johns Jay College is correspondence with Bowen about his theories of family therapy, and some letters talking about the Cosmopolitan story. But none mention any family in therapy. Nor is there an iota of discussion about how a particular mother, father, and daughter might have felt about appearing in a magazine, or what they thought of the work in progress....

But Flora was a journalist, no a psychiatrist. She was supposed to interview people in order to tell their stories-or at least make it clear that she was getting her information indirectly. She failed to warn her readers that she had spoken only with Dr. Bowen and could not verify that Helen and her parents existed. Meanwhile, Mel Herman, her liaison to the psychiatrists, assured clinicians that if they worked with Flora they wouldn't have to tell her about actual people." (pp.117-118)

I take some comfort in knowing that both Dr. Cornelia Wilbur and Flora Schreiber have been widely discredited. I also take some comfort knowing the Shirley died with her identity still hidden. I feel that had the world knew who she was before then, it would have caused more serious mental disorders than what she really did suffer from, especially since both Wilbur and Schreiber died before she did and she would have been alone to defend herself, which is not something she would have been capable of. 

Ultimately, I am disappointed. I am grateful that a poor innocent child did not suffer so severely at the hands of her mother, and that there were not really sixteen personalities that disassociated because of it. No, what disappoints me are the blatant lies and lack of care taken by Wilbur and Schreiber. The real tale, which can be heard through recordings and read through transcripts, are just glimmers in the book and subsequent movie (which is even more grossly twisted away from the reality). It was said many times by Schreiber that Shirley needed a happy ending before the book could be written. Many details were embellished to make it more interesting to the reader; in the movie, some things completely made up. All of this leads to my disappointment that people who wanted to be "mavericks" of their fields and help people, took such horrid care of something that could have actually meant something and actually helped people. Instead, peoples times were wasted, lawsuits were had, families torn apart, jobs lost, all in the decades after Sybil was released. It was not just these three women that were affected, it was people across the world.

Rating: 6/10
Author: Debbie Nathan
Genres: Non-fiction, Psychology, Biography
Dates Read: September 6-10, 2018