Debbie Nathan: Exposing Sybil
Jan. 10th, 2012 05:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marinessI can't remember just when or where I first encountered Sybil, that international bestseller about a young girl grossly abused by her mother who had shattered into 16 separate personalities as a result. I do remember that I found it enthralling if not always well written, although when I finished, I had quite a few questions.
No, not about the multiple personality part. What I questioned was threefold: the happy ending, which seemed too tight, too perfect. I'd already read I'm Eve (about another multiple personality, Chris Costner Sizemore) which cast doubts on the ease of the ending. The way a book supposedly about a woman understandably desperate to remain anonymous contained so many identifying details. And I questioned one or two of the public incidents described in the book. Not the ones about abuse—I am all too aware of the syndrome that allows people to turn their eyes from abuse happening right in front of them – but the ones that involved Sybil's mother, Hattie, destroying private property as people watched – and did nothing.
That – struck me the wrong way, especially since the book attempted to tell us both that Sybil came from a respected family, powerful enough that no one dared speak against Hattie – and yet was also poverty stricken. A discordant note. But, supposed reassurances from Sybil aside, she hadn't written the book – a journalist had. I figured at some point, someone would do some investigation and find the real identity of Sybil – and possibly clear up some of these questions.
I was right; people from Sybil's hometown and Sybil's coworkers immediately identified her as Shirley Ardell Mason shortly after the publication of the book, as did members of Sybil's family. (Her stepmother, never accused of harming anyone, was hurt by the still negative portrayal in the book.) After Mason's death, her identity was publicized, and in 2011, Debbie Nathan released Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case, telling the lives of Shirley Mason, her psychiatrist Cornelia Wilbur, and writer Flora Rheta Schreiber, with bookending chapters discussing the history of multiple personality cases in the media and popular culture.
Nathan has one immediate advantage over Flora Rheta Schreiber, SybilSybil the book set off a firestorm of false child and ritual abuse cases, combined with reports of multiple personality disorder. In turn, many patients diagnosed with multiple personality disorder and as survivors of child abuse later recanted their diagnoses and memories of child abuse and sued their therapists for implanting false memories.
These are valid concerns, and Nathan makes a compelling case that using Sybil as a case study for the inevitable result of horrific child/sexual abuse and multiple personality is deeply problematic. Unfortunately, in her zeal to combat these reports, Nathan has gone just a touch too far and leapt to the conclusion that multiple personality/dissociative personality disorder does not exist and is a twentieth century invention, as she details in this book.
This argument runs into immediate problems. The first is statistical. Nathan correctly notes that the reported cases of multiple personality disorder in the United States skyrocketed after the publication of Sybil, from perhaps one or two cases in the 19th century in a generation to thousands. Some of this may very well stem from the book's influence. But this leaves out one important factor: the skyrocketing population of the U.S. population in the 20th century, from (if Wikipedia is accurate) 76,212,168 in 1900 to 281,421,906 in 2000. Given the greater population, we should expect to see more of any naturally occurring illnesses, since Nathan never looks at percentages, but only actual numbers. Admittedly, thousands is more than we would expect from pure statistics – but see the next paragraph.
The second is diagnosis. My primary care physician has cheerfully told me that my supposedly "exceedingly rare" benign bone disease is now just "rare", since now doctors have been trained to recognize it. This is even more true for mental illnesses, which few were bothering to treat, much less diagnose, prior to the 20th century, and in even in the first half of the 20th century. So, although it's certainly possible, and even likely, that the publication of Sybil and The Three Faces of Eve did create copycat cases, other factors could also be contributing to the increase in diagnoses of multiple personality/dissociative personality disorder.
The third is Nathan's claim that multiple personality/dissociative disorder was first observed and diagnosed in the 20th century. This is false. The term was used in the nineteenth century, and reports of similar conditions are attested in ancient literature and even the New Testament, in the Gospel of John. The condition was always considered highly rare, certainly, but "rare" does not mean "non existent," and it's fairly difficult to believe that a condition could have been invented and discovered in the 20th century because it fit growing feminist themes of the time when early Christian writers discussed it in distinctly non feminist terms. Rather, it suggests that this rare condition can be used to fit the narrative and world view of multiple cultures.
Nonetheless, Nathan, convinced that multiple personality does not exist, announces, close to the end of the book, that Mason had never had multiple personality disorder at all. (The revelation has a rather ta-da! ring to it.) Instead, Nathan claims, all of her symptoms (and her mother's) could be completely accounted for by pernicious anemia (an inability to absorb vitamin B12) a disease Mason did have. And this is a problem. A big problem.
See I know two people who suffered from this before getting diagnosed, and I have to tell you: the memory issues, physical problems and personality changes they suffered? Were not of the same type reported by multiple witnesses to Mason's behavior, detailed in this book. My coworker with the pernicious anemia did not lose time; she lost facts. Dates. How to do things in Excel. What she'd just been doing. Her name, on rare occasions (this scared her into going to the doctor). She also got very depressed (I'm honestly not sure if that was a symptom of the disease or a result of other symptoms) and irritable – but she was not and would never have been taken for a multiple personality. Nor did she change voices or exhibit the other symptoms associated with multiple personality that Mason exhibited before and during college, well before she encountered Dr. Wilbur, although she did have some of the same physical issues (numbness, tingling, walking into doors. (And since I've brought her up the good news is that heavy levels of B-12 helped if not cured her problems.)
I realize, of course, that I'm extrapolating a lot from these two cases, and not every case of pernicious anemia will have the same symptoms. But Nathan is also out of bounds when she airily assumes that all memory and concentration issues are the same, or that they remain consistent. (I can tell you that my own current memory and concentration issues – it's taken forever to write this post, for instance, because I keep getting lost in it – are completely dependent upon my levels of fatigue and vary daily, thus my complete dependency on Google Calendar and Microsoft Excel, with failures even there.)
Second, Nathan forgets, or is unaware, that diseases can often be comorbid, and thus, it is perfectly possible for someone to have both pernicious anemia and another mental illness/condition altogether. And although she notes that Mason's physical condition varied, she seems unaware that this often happens with chronic illnesses such as pernicious anemia. If, as some have argued, the symptoms of multiple personality are triggered by stress (I realize this is debatable), it is entirely possible that Mason's alters only appeared when Mason happened to be suffering from anemia.
And in her zeal to discredit Wilbur and Mason, Nathan occasionally goes too far. For example, at one point, Nathan notes, triumphantly, that a diary entry written by Mason and dated 1941 could not possibly have been written in 1941 – it contains a mention of a book that was not published until 1943 and was written in ballpoint ink, not available in 1941. From this, she concludes that Mason's diaries were completely faked. Fair enough, except for one small problem: these were diaries written by a woman who was by all accounts, even Nathan's, suffering from neurological issues. The diaries could have been faked. Or, they could have been written by a woman suffering from neurological issues and mental illness who just got the date wrong.
In another case, Nathan devotes several pages to the skepticism of the screenwriter hired to adapt the book into the Sally Field vehicle, which is all very nice, except that the screenwriter has no credentials in history, biography or psychiatry, which makes his doubts interesting but not very useful. I suspect they are in the book as further proof of Nathan's argument that no rational person could believe in Sybil; Nathan also quotes several others who were skeptical of parts of the book as proof that it should never have been published, and she is correct to note that Sybil failed, on a massive scale, with the fact checking process.
This should have been enough to bolster Nathan's point that using Sybil as a case study for the inevitable result of horrific child/sexual abuse, or a typical case of child/sexual abuse, is problematic, and Nathan easily could have left matters there. But as I noted, Nathan has an axe to grind, so simply denying some of Mason's wilder, more drug induced tales, or even all of the abuse, is not enough for Nathan. To make her point, she needs to deny nearly everything Mason said. ("Nearly," because Mason's family and neighbors corroborated some of Mason's accounts and Mason's initial reports to Wilbur, before Wilbur attempted to find a writer and publisher.)
True, Nathan has significant evidence of exaggeration. Even Schreiber herself felt that Shirley Mason's actual story was not exciting enough for the book, and she, Wilbur and Mason worked to give Mason's alters more distinctive personalities and more exciting storylines. And Nathan is on solid ground with noting issues with some of Mason's stories, as reported in Sybil; the trip to Philadelphia that opens the book, for instance, could not have happened as it did (Schreiber was even sued about this.) Schreiber even refused to put in one such story, about a supposed case where Mason had turned into one of her alternative personalities, Peggy, and ended up in Amsterdam; given the dates (corresponding with World War II), it could not have happened. But, to ensure an exciting book, Schreiber did leave in other tales, even after colleagues raised concerns.
And Nathan is on solid ground with doubting many of these. Schreiber told Mason and Wilbur that the book had to be exciting and sensational to sell, and they responded with various exciting and sensational stories (the stories of lesbian orgies, in particular, contain questionable details.) Plus, many of Mason's stories, and in particular her stories of abuse by her mother, were reported under the influence of drugs, and investigation reported inaccuracies with several details – where trees were located, for instance. And even Mason did not report these stories for years. Nathan also reports conversations where Wilbur was, to put it mildly, leading the witness, casting further doubt on Mason's reports that her mother abused her.
If even half of what Nathan is saying is true – and Nathan provides quite a bit of documentation here – Wilbur regularly crossed ethical boundaries, not just with Shirley Mason, but with other patients. Wilbur also had a habit of making declarations well before she had sufficient evidence to do so, not just in psychiatry, but in an earlier career where she made claims about an athlete's foot soap she had developed – claims that later proved less than true. In psychiatry she made intense use of drugs, and if she did help some people, she also, according to Nathan, conducted what were essentially medical experiments with high levels of barbiturates on mentally ill patients in a hellish asylum in Michigan used to confine those too poor to seek treatment elsewhere, where many patients went hungry, were assaulted and abused, and sometimes found themselves sleeping in urine and feces. These patients were not capable of consent. From here, Nathan tells us, Wilbur headed to Omaha, where "…she was also drilling holes in their skulls and turning their brains into pulp." (page 49)
To put it mildly, Wilbur does not come off well here, and Nathan expresses deep skepticism about any of Wilbur's positive results – some of which were captured on film and/or accepted for publication in prestigious journals. In fact, Wilbur's later Park Avenue career – lucrative enough that she was able to treat Shirley Mason for free for years and provide Mason extensive financial assistance – was based on her accomplishments at Omaha, which others saw as helping patients. (Nathan uses some rhetoric to suggest otherwise, and unfortunately fails to note whether or not she researched the fate of Wilbur's Omaha patients, which would have been interesting if less gossipy than details of Flora Schrieber's love life.)
But however much Wilbur may have helped some of her patients, Nathan is probably right to claim that Shirley Mason was not abused, or at least not to the extent reported in Sybil. If I question the validity of some of her evidence (including witnesses speaking decades later, who would not have known the Masons well and/or needed to defend themselves against any accusation that they did nothing to help an abused child), the lack of medical evidence, and the small problem that many of these stories did not appear until Wilbur put Mason on heavy drugs or after Schreiber begged for something more interesting to put into the book, says something. (On the other hand, statements by witnesses about Mason's problems as a child, and odd behaviors by family members, also say something.)
But, and this is important, none of this says that Mason was not a multiple. At least some multiples have reported that the condition can arise outside of child or sexual abuse, and suggested that children with multiple personalities may be more likely to report punishments from frustrated parents. Chris Costner Sizemore, for example, came from a loving and supportive if poverty stricken family and claimed that her multiplicity was not a reaction to some of the traumas she inadvertently (and to the honest horror of her mother) witnessed but had been present previously. But she also reported extreme frustration and anger of family members convinced Sizemore was a habitual liar, and spankings and punishment as a result – leading to the suggestion that perhaps multiples may (or may not) be punished more than other children, edging towards abuse. Given the behavior that Mason and her relatives reported, it's possible that Mason was also severely punished for similar incidents, and Wilbur translated this to abuse.
And for all her claims that Mason developed multiple personalities only after meeting Cornelia Wilbur, even Nathan reports an interesting situation where Mason suddenly began to speak in a high, childish voice in front of an embarrassed friend, and also that the devout Adventist girl with a strict no-alcohol policy would suddenly report that she'd been uncharacteristically drinking at bars. Mason also had problems with losing time and making it to her classes, and showed other signs of shifting personalities -- well before meeting Dr. Wilbur. According to Nathan, some witnesses denied seeing any of this, although it is important to note that these were witnesses concerned with defending themselves against the slander that they had seen a young girl or woman in trouble and done nothing about it, and even these denying witnesses agreed that something was wrong with Mason and her mother – again, well before Mason ever met Wilbur.
And Nathan's other argument, that Mason was inspired by the book and popular movie The Three Face of Eve, and used the film to develop personalities to intrigue Dr. Wilbur, runs into its own problems, and not simply because the two cases were not particularly similar. Nathan explains that, like Sybil, The Three Faces of Eve proved popular because the film and story fit a feminine (not feminist) narrative that the 1950s wanted to hear.
But "popular" does not necessarily mean "non-existent." Sizemore herself has disputed the veracity of the initial and movie versions of her life, and her real life, as documented, does not fit into these feminine narratives. And, despite Nathan's argument that multiple personality is largely a creation of the psychiatric profession, she provides no evidence that Sizemore's psychiatrists did anything to worsen her condition (by all accounts it took them by surprise) and ignores the fact that Sizemore was treated by multiple psychiatrists, all verifying her claim, as did the oral histories and evidence of
Sizemore's frustrated relatives.
It doubtless would have been better if Nathan could have left Sizemore out of this book altogether, but then that would have left Nathan struggling to explain how Mason could have come up with her story of multiple personalities – not to mention that Sybil includes a scene where Sybil and her roommate watch the popular movie. But it provides just another awkward note in this book.
In other words, a book meant to convince me that Shirley Mason never suffered from multiple personality and that the entire book was a well meaning hoax to make money ended up convincing me that Mason might well have been one, whose story was exaggerated and exploited for profit. Had Nathan merely denied Mason's wilder, drug-induced stories, instead of attempting to deny nearly everything Mason said, I might have been convinced. ("Nearly," because Mason's family and neighbors corroborated some of Mason's accounts and Mason's initial reports to Wilbur, before Wilbur attempted to find a writer and publisher, part of the problem with Nathan's argument.) But Nathan's overreaching caused me to look at the rest of the book with a jaundiced eye.
A pity, because – if you haven't guessed by the length of my spiel here – this is a fascinating, well written book. I only wish I could have believed in more of it.
No, not about the multiple personality part. What I questioned was threefold: the happy ending, which seemed too tight, too perfect. I'd already read I'm Eve (about another multiple personality, Chris Costner Sizemore) which cast doubts on the ease of the ending. The way a book supposedly about a woman understandably desperate to remain anonymous contained so many identifying details. And I questioned one or two of the public incidents described in the book. Not the ones about abuse—I am all too aware of the syndrome that allows people to turn their eyes from abuse happening right in front of them – but the ones that involved Sybil's mother, Hattie, destroying private property as people watched – and did nothing.
That – struck me the wrong way, especially since the book attempted to tell us both that Sybil came from a respected family, powerful enough that no one dared speak against Hattie – and yet was also poverty stricken. A discordant note. But, supposed reassurances from Sybil aside, she hadn't written the book – a journalist had. I figured at some point, someone would do some investigation and find the real identity of Sybil – and possibly clear up some of these questions.
I was right; people from Sybil's hometown and Sybil's coworkers immediately identified her as Shirley Ardell Mason shortly after the publication of the book, as did members of Sybil's family. (Her stepmother, never accused of harming anyone, was hurt by the still negative portrayal in the book.) After Mason's death, her identity was publicized, and in 2011, Debbie Nathan released Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case, telling the lives of Shirley Mason, her psychiatrist Cornelia Wilbur, and writer Flora Rheta Schreiber, with bookending chapters discussing the history of multiple personality cases in the media and popular culture.
Nathan has one immediate advantage over Flora Rheta Schreiber, SybilSybil the book set off a firestorm of false child and ritual abuse cases, combined with reports of multiple personality disorder. In turn, many patients diagnosed with multiple personality disorder and as survivors of child abuse later recanted their diagnoses and memories of child abuse and sued their therapists for implanting false memories.
These are valid concerns, and Nathan makes a compelling case that using Sybil as a case study for the inevitable result of horrific child/sexual abuse and multiple personality is deeply problematic. Unfortunately, in her zeal to combat these reports, Nathan has gone just a touch too far and leapt to the conclusion that multiple personality/dissociative personality disorder does not exist and is a twentieth century invention, as she details in this book.
This argument runs into immediate problems. The first is statistical. Nathan correctly notes that the reported cases of multiple personality disorder in the United States skyrocketed after the publication of Sybil, from perhaps one or two cases in the 19th century in a generation to thousands. Some of this may very well stem from the book's influence. But this leaves out one important factor: the skyrocketing population of the U.S. population in the 20th century, from (if Wikipedia is accurate) 76,212,168 in 1900 to 281,421,906 in 2000. Given the greater population, we should expect to see more of any naturally occurring illnesses, since Nathan never looks at percentages, but only actual numbers. Admittedly, thousands is more than we would expect from pure statistics – but see the next paragraph.
The second is diagnosis. My primary care physician has cheerfully told me that my supposedly "exceedingly rare" benign bone disease is now just "rare", since now doctors have been trained to recognize it. This is even more true for mental illnesses, which few were bothering to treat, much less diagnose, prior to the 20th century, and in even in the first half of the 20th century. So, although it's certainly possible, and even likely, that the publication of Sybil and The Three Faces of Eve did create copycat cases, other factors could also be contributing to the increase in diagnoses of multiple personality/dissociative personality disorder.
The third is Nathan's claim that multiple personality/dissociative disorder was first observed and diagnosed in the 20th century. This is false. The term was used in the nineteenth century, and reports of similar conditions are attested in ancient literature and even the New Testament, in the Gospel of John. The condition was always considered highly rare, certainly, but "rare" does not mean "non existent," and it's fairly difficult to believe that a condition could have been invented and discovered in the 20th century because it fit growing feminist themes of the time when early Christian writers discussed it in distinctly non feminist terms. Rather, it suggests that this rare condition can be used to fit the narrative and world view of multiple cultures.
Nonetheless, Nathan, convinced that multiple personality does not exist, announces, close to the end of the book, that Mason had never had multiple personality disorder at all. (The revelation has a rather ta-da! ring to it.) Instead, Nathan claims, all of her symptoms (and her mother's) could be completely accounted for by pernicious anemia (an inability to absorb vitamin B12) a disease Mason did have. And this is a problem. A big problem.
See I know two people who suffered from this before getting diagnosed, and I have to tell you: the memory issues, physical problems and personality changes they suffered? Were not of the same type reported by multiple witnesses to Mason's behavior, detailed in this book. My coworker with the pernicious anemia did not lose time; she lost facts. Dates. How to do things in Excel. What she'd just been doing. Her name, on rare occasions (this scared her into going to the doctor). She also got very depressed (I'm honestly not sure if that was a symptom of the disease or a result of other symptoms) and irritable – but she was not and would never have been taken for a multiple personality. Nor did she change voices or exhibit the other symptoms associated with multiple personality that Mason exhibited before and during college, well before she encountered Dr. Wilbur, although she did have some of the same physical issues (numbness, tingling, walking into doors. (And since I've brought her up the good news is that heavy levels of B-12 helped if not cured her problems.)
I realize, of course, that I'm extrapolating a lot from these two cases, and not every case of pernicious anemia will have the same symptoms. But Nathan is also out of bounds when she airily assumes that all memory and concentration issues are the same, or that they remain consistent. (I can tell you that my own current memory and concentration issues – it's taken forever to write this post, for instance, because I keep getting lost in it – are completely dependent upon my levels of fatigue and vary daily, thus my complete dependency on Google Calendar and Microsoft Excel, with failures even there.)
Second, Nathan forgets, or is unaware, that diseases can often be comorbid, and thus, it is perfectly possible for someone to have both pernicious anemia and another mental illness/condition altogether. And although she notes that Mason's physical condition varied, she seems unaware that this often happens with chronic illnesses such as pernicious anemia. If, as some have argued, the symptoms of multiple personality are triggered by stress (I realize this is debatable), it is entirely possible that Mason's alters only appeared when Mason happened to be suffering from anemia.
And in her zeal to discredit Wilbur and Mason, Nathan occasionally goes too far. For example, at one point, Nathan notes, triumphantly, that a diary entry written by Mason and dated 1941 could not possibly have been written in 1941 – it contains a mention of a book that was not published until 1943 and was written in ballpoint ink, not available in 1941. From this, she concludes that Mason's diaries were completely faked. Fair enough, except for one small problem: these were diaries written by a woman who was by all accounts, even Nathan's, suffering from neurological issues. The diaries could have been faked. Or, they could have been written by a woman suffering from neurological issues and mental illness who just got the date wrong.
In another case, Nathan devotes several pages to the skepticism of the screenwriter hired to adapt the book into the Sally Field vehicle, which is all very nice, except that the screenwriter has no credentials in history, biography or psychiatry, which makes his doubts interesting but not very useful. I suspect they are in the book as further proof of Nathan's argument that no rational person could believe in Sybil; Nathan also quotes several others who were skeptical of parts of the book as proof that it should never have been published, and she is correct to note that Sybil failed, on a massive scale, with the fact checking process.
This should have been enough to bolster Nathan's point that using Sybil as a case study for the inevitable result of horrific child/sexual abuse, or a typical case of child/sexual abuse, is problematic, and Nathan easily could have left matters there. But as I noted, Nathan has an axe to grind, so simply denying some of Mason's wilder, more drug induced tales, or even all of the abuse, is not enough for Nathan. To make her point, she needs to deny nearly everything Mason said. ("Nearly," because Mason's family and neighbors corroborated some of Mason's accounts and Mason's initial reports to Wilbur, before Wilbur attempted to find a writer and publisher.)
True, Nathan has significant evidence of exaggeration. Even Schreiber herself felt that Shirley Mason's actual story was not exciting enough for the book, and she, Wilbur and Mason worked to give Mason's alters more distinctive personalities and more exciting storylines. And Nathan is on solid ground with noting issues with some of Mason's stories, as reported in Sybil; the trip to Philadelphia that opens the book, for instance, could not have happened as it did (Schreiber was even sued about this.) Schreiber even refused to put in one such story, about a supposed case where Mason had turned into one of her alternative personalities, Peggy, and ended up in Amsterdam; given the dates (corresponding with World War II), it could not have happened. But, to ensure an exciting book, Schreiber did leave in other tales, even after colleagues raised concerns.
And Nathan is on solid ground with doubting many of these. Schreiber told Mason and Wilbur that the book had to be exciting and sensational to sell, and they responded with various exciting and sensational stories (the stories of lesbian orgies, in particular, contain questionable details.) Plus, many of Mason's stories, and in particular her stories of abuse by her mother, were reported under the influence of drugs, and investigation reported inaccuracies with several details – where trees were located, for instance. And even Mason did not report these stories for years. Nathan also reports conversations where Wilbur was, to put it mildly, leading the witness, casting further doubt on Mason's reports that her mother abused her.
If even half of what Nathan is saying is true – and Nathan provides quite a bit of documentation here – Wilbur regularly crossed ethical boundaries, not just with Shirley Mason, but with other patients. Wilbur also had a habit of making declarations well before she had sufficient evidence to do so, not just in psychiatry, but in an earlier career where she made claims about an athlete's foot soap she had developed – claims that later proved less than true. In psychiatry she made intense use of drugs, and if she did help some people, she also, according to Nathan, conducted what were essentially medical experiments with high levels of barbiturates on mentally ill patients in a hellish asylum in Michigan used to confine those too poor to seek treatment elsewhere, where many patients went hungry, were assaulted and abused, and sometimes found themselves sleeping in urine and feces. These patients were not capable of consent. From here, Nathan tells us, Wilbur headed to Omaha, where "…she was also drilling holes in their skulls and turning their brains into pulp." (page 49)
To put it mildly, Wilbur does not come off well here, and Nathan expresses deep skepticism about any of Wilbur's positive results – some of which were captured on film and/or accepted for publication in prestigious journals. In fact, Wilbur's later Park Avenue career – lucrative enough that she was able to treat Shirley Mason for free for years and provide Mason extensive financial assistance – was based on her accomplishments at Omaha, which others saw as helping patients. (Nathan uses some rhetoric to suggest otherwise, and unfortunately fails to note whether or not she researched the fate of Wilbur's Omaha patients, which would have been interesting if less gossipy than details of Flora Schrieber's love life.)
But however much Wilbur may have helped some of her patients, Nathan is probably right to claim that Shirley Mason was not abused, or at least not to the extent reported in Sybil. If I question the validity of some of her evidence (including witnesses speaking decades later, who would not have known the Masons well and/or needed to defend themselves against any accusation that they did nothing to help an abused child), the lack of medical evidence, and the small problem that many of these stories did not appear until Wilbur put Mason on heavy drugs or after Schreiber begged for something more interesting to put into the book, says something. (On the other hand, statements by witnesses about Mason's problems as a child, and odd behaviors by family members, also say something.)
But, and this is important, none of this says that Mason was not a multiple. At least some multiples have reported that the condition can arise outside of child or sexual abuse, and suggested that children with multiple personalities may be more likely to report punishments from frustrated parents. Chris Costner Sizemore, for example, came from a loving and supportive if poverty stricken family and claimed that her multiplicity was not a reaction to some of the traumas she inadvertently (and to the honest horror of her mother) witnessed but had been present previously. But she also reported extreme frustration and anger of family members convinced Sizemore was a habitual liar, and spankings and punishment as a result – leading to the suggestion that perhaps multiples may (or may not) be punished more than other children, edging towards abuse. Given the behavior that Mason and her relatives reported, it's possible that Mason was also severely punished for similar incidents, and Wilbur translated this to abuse.
And for all her claims that Mason developed multiple personalities only after meeting Cornelia Wilbur, even Nathan reports an interesting situation where Mason suddenly began to speak in a high, childish voice in front of an embarrassed friend, and also that the devout Adventist girl with a strict no-alcohol policy would suddenly report that she'd been uncharacteristically drinking at bars. Mason also had problems with losing time and making it to her classes, and showed other signs of shifting personalities -- well before meeting Dr. Wilbur. According to Nathan, some witnesses denied seeing any of this, although it is important to note that these were witnesses concerned with defending themselves against the slander that they had seen a young girl or woman in trouble and done nothing about it, and even these denying witnesses agreed that something was wrong with Mason and her mother – again, well before Mason ever met Wilbur.
And Nathan's other argument, that Mason was inspired by the book and popular movie The Three Face of Eve, and used the film to develop personalities to intrigue Dr. Wilbur, runs into its own problems, and not simply because the two cases were not particularly similar. Nathan explains that, like Sybil, The Three Faces of Eve proved popular because the film and story fit a feminine (not feminist) narrative that the 1950s wanted to hear.
But "popular" does not necessarily mean "non-existent." Sizemore herself has disputed the veracity of the initial and movie versions of her life, and her real life, as documented, does not fit into these feminine narratives. And, despite Nathan's argument that multiple personality is largely a creation of the psychiatric profession, she provides no evidence that Sizemore's psychiatrists did anything to worsen her condition (by all accounts it took them by surprise) and ignores the fact that Sizemore was treated by multiple psychiatrists, all verifying her claim, as did the oral histories and evidence of
Sizemore's frustrated relatives.
It doubtless would have been better if Nathan could have left Sizemore out of this book altogether, but then that would have left Nathan struggling to explain how Mason could have come up with her story of multiple personalities – not to mention that Sybil includes a scene where Sybil and her roommate watch the popular movie. But it provides just another awkward note in this book.
In other words, a book meant to convince me that Shirley Mason never suffered from multiple personality and that the entire book was a well meaning hoax to make money ended up convincing me that Mason might well have been one, whose story was exaggerated and exploited for profit. Had Nathan merely denied Mason's wilder, drug-induced stories, instead of attempting to deny nearly everything Mason said, I might have been convinced. ("Nearly," because Mason's family and neighbors corroborated some of Mason's accounts and Mason's initial reports to Wilbur, before Wilbur attempted to find a writer and publisher, part of the problem with Nathan's argument.) But Nathan's overreaching caused me to look at the rest of the book with a jaundiced eye.
A pity, because – if you haven't guessed by the length of my spiel here – this is a fascinating, well written book. I only wish I could have believed in more of it.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-11 01:38 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-11 01:52 am (UTC)I think that's why I found this book so frustrating - and wrote so much about it. It had the potential to be EXCELLENT, but it was written in a hurry and pulled all kinds of crap and did the same thing that it was yelling at its subjects for doing.
But in terms of explaining how cultural contexts can shape some of the perceptions/diagnoses/narratives of mental illness, this was actually a pretty decent book, and if I hadn't known as much about Chris Costner Sizemore as I did (who ended up needing considerably MORE therapy because her first therapists saw her in those contexts, and didn't realize that her story did not fit their narrative.