Back when I was in college, there was a TV miniseries (I never actually saw it myself) called “Sybil,” starring Sally Field. It told the story of a woman who suffered from Multiple Personality Disorder, induced by horrendous childhood abuse. It was based on a “fact-based” book, with names and locations disguised.
Still, the word got around as to what the (supposed) facts were. The real Sybil was a woman named Shirley Mason, and she’d grown up in the little town of Dodge Center, Minnesota. Dodge Center is a neighboring town to my own home town, Kenyon. I remember riding through Dodge Center around that time, thinking, “It all happened here.”
Only it didn’t.
According to this New York Post article, the whole thing was a fraud, perpetrated by a disturbed woman who loved attention, a drug-happy therapist looking to make a reputation, and a sensationalist writer.
A new book, Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case, written by Debbie Nathan, tells the story of how it happened that Shirley Mason went to school in New York, and came to be under the treatment of therapist Connie Wilbur.

One day, Shirley started talking about blackouts in which, she claimed, she became others with various names and personalities — Peggy Lou, Peggy Ann, Vicky, etc.

Fascinated, Connie offered, “Would you like to earn some money?” She suggested that her patient could be the subject of a book. Connie offered to pay Shirley’s medical-school tuition and living expenses.
The personality split was a lie, Shirley confessed in a five-page 1958 letter that sits in the archives at John Jay. She said she was “none of the things I have pretended to be.”
Shirley continued, “I do not have any multiple personalities … I do not even have a ‘double’ … I am all of them. I have essentially been lying … as trying to show you I felt I needed help … Quite thrilling. Got me a lot of attention.”
In order to spice the book up, a history of childhood sexual abuse was added.

Soon, “multiple personality disorder,” or MPD, became an officially recognized diagnosis, and a handful of cases exploded into 40,000 reported sufferers, nearly all of them female. The repressed-memory industry was born. Only in the last decade or so has the psychiatric profession begun to question the validity of Sybilmania.

I don’t know that the story proves, or that author Nathan intends to prove, that Multiple Personality Disorder does not exist in the real world. But the case that made it famous (and launched a thousand TV crime show scripts) was apparently a lie.
I respect honest psychological counseling, and have benefited from it at least once in the past.
But it’s more art than hard science. I think it’s about time we all accepted that.
Tip: Ed Driscoll.