"She lived in a fantasy world as a little girl," Nathan said. But Shirley was a highly imaginative child, who loved to make up stories. The fundamentalist Christian sect taught that people shouldn't read fiction. Sybil's real name was Shirley Mason, and she was brought up as a Seventh Day Adventist in rural Minnesota. And by the late 1980s there were 40,000 cases diagnosed in the United States alone." "But after the book and film, suddenly there were hundreds and thousands.
"In the entire history of Western civilization, there had been less than 200 over a period of centuries," Nathan said. Once that happened, the disorder, which had been extremely rare, became a relatively common diagnosis. Sybil's case generated widespread fascination both in the general public and the medical community, and a group of psychiatrists and psychologists successfully lobbied to have multiple personality disorder included in the DSM ( Diagnostic and Statistical Manual). And ultimately Sybil remembered terrible, hideous sexual abuse and torture by her mother, and once she came to remember that, she reintegrated and was able to have a happy life after that. So she spent many years working with her. The therapist assumed that something terrible must have happened to her when she was a child to create this kind of splitting in her consciousness. And as she went into further therapy with the therapist, she developed many other personalities, a total of 16. Nathan described what happened after a few sessions, as detailed in the book: "She had a very dramatic moment when she started smashing windows, and split into another personality, into a little girl.
In the original book, Sybil is portrayed as a young woman who started seeing a psychoanalyst in New York City in the early 1950s. She reveals the truth about the case in her new book, Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case, which she discussed in a recent interview on The Current. Much of the sensational story was fabricated, according to journalist and author Debbie Nathan. Sybil also profited, but her true identity remained a secret until after all three women were dead. Cornelia Wilbur, became rich and famous as a result. Author Flora Schreiber and Sybil's psychiatrist, Dr. Sybil was a bestselling book in the 1970s and was adapted as a 1976 television mini-series and a feature-length docudrama in 2007. The story of Sybil - a young woman who had been abused by her mother as a child and, as a result, had a mental breakdown and created multiple personalities - caused a sensation.
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