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

This book is crummy on so many levels it's hard to know where to begin, but here goes. First things first: Debbie Nathan has an agenda, no, make that an AGENDA. And that agenda is to prove that the story of "Sybil" is completely, entirely fake and that the creators of "Sybil" (Connie Wilbur, Flora Rheta Schreiber and Shirley Mason) were three contemptible liars whose actions caused untold miseries for millions of people due to their bogus tales of child abuse that never happened and the grave psychiatric condition that supposedly resulted from it. In Nathan's opinion "Sybil" is the direct cause of false memory syndrome, "satanic panic" and a myriad of other psychiatric frauds and misconducts. She holds Wilbur, Schreiber and Mason all personally responsible for doing unfathomable harm to others by creating this silly, nonexistent psychiatric diagnosis called Multiple Personality Disorder. Make no mistake about it: Nathan HATES these women. Her anger and disgust leap off every page. Her grudge gets tiresome very quickly; it's boring and mind-numbing to keep hearing how awful Wilbur, Schrieber and poor Shirley Mason were. Nathan gloats about what she perceives are their "failures" and even takes potshots at the way they look! Let it be said that I never believed that "Sybil" was 100% fact. I always thought it was fact mixed with fiction, as most "true" books are. And I always thought that the descriptions of Sybil's disassociation into her "selves" were probably exaggerated. But I did and do believe that something went on in Shirley Mason's life that caused her lifelong mental and physical anguish; I think it was part environment and part heredity that made her anorexic, nervous, subject to tics and fainting spells and bizarre behavior. But Nathan will have none of this; she reiterates over and over that Mason was NOT abused. Oh sure, she grew up in a stifling religious environment that prohibited its members from even having an imagination, because anything imagined is sinful, but that's not really abuse, at least not in Nathan's mind. Her mother was pathologically overprotective and possessive and "odd; her father was a milquetoast who paid little attention to her and let the domineering Mattie be the one always in control. That does not constitute abuse to her, either. And her lifelong anorexia and other physical problems? Her lifelong mental issues? Although Nathan admits to being "no doctor", she claims that Shirley Mason's troubles were all the result of something called "pernicious anemia...an inborn lack of ability to some people to process Vitamin B12." Well, if that were so then why did Mason's symptoms improve (her physical ones, anyway) when she was given injections of hog's liver? If she were unable to process vitamin B, it would seem to me that the injections would have had little effect. There was also the meatless diet she was forced to eat (her religion forbade eating meat; eating meat was supposed to be "sinful") and her anorexia. Those factors would have contributed to her anemia. It appears that she COULD process vitamin B, but most of the time lacked getting it in food or supplements. That "pernicious anemia" theory...well, Nathan claims that Connie Wilbur herself blurted out Mason's TRUE malady during an innocuous Q & A session. When asked how Sybil was doing, Connie's "brief, almost throwaway" answer was that Sybil had lived a long time without much energy due to "pernicious anemia." "No one stopped to think about the bombshell Connie had revealed", Nathan says. In Nathan's mind, the "bombshell" was that Connie had inadvertently exposed the REAL reason for all of Shirley Mason's mental and physical disablities. Nathan seized on those two words, pernicious anemia: "AH HA! So THAT'S it! That's the reason for every symptom, mental and physical, that Shirley and Mattie Mason every had! The truth has been revealed!" Hmm...Nathan goes to quite a lot of effort to discredit Connie Wilbur; throughout the book Wilbur is portrayed as a liar, a fraud, an unprincipled woman out to achieve her own aims no matter what she had to do to succeed. And yet Nathan wholeheartedly believes that Wilbur's "throwaway" answer is the gospel truth, the revelation that Nathan has been seeking. I think Wilbur meant nothing more than saying Shirley Mason was anemic, and didn't really care to elaborate. Why do that? Mason was a frail anorexic; of course she'd be prone to anemia. But, as usual, Nathan twists facts and events to shore up her own relentless agenda, to make it seem like all of Shirley Mason's (and her mother's) problems stemmed from a PHYSICAL condition, not a mental one. Nathan spends a great deal of time defending Mattie Mason. She admits that Mattie Mason, was strange, odd, nervous, manic. She admits that she was so overprotective of Shirley (smothering, really) that she walked her to school every day, holding her hand, even though the school was right near their house. She did this even when Shirley was a teenager. She concedes that Mattie had a screeching laugh and that she would get what she called "the blues" so bad she would be mute and motionless for long periods of time (sounds like catatonia to me). Neighbors recalled her peering into the windows of other people's houses. She says that people who knew her described her as "a little strange, but nice." She doesn't sound that "nice" to me, but she does sound really, REALLY "strange." In fact, she sounds like she was very mentally disturbed. One of the reasons I read this book was because I wanted to know more about all the principles in the story: Wilbur, Sybil/Shirley, and her parents Mattie and Walter. But they seem made of cardboard in this book; Nathan gives the reader no insight into their personalities at all, I guess because she's just concerned with the surface of things and has no interest in doing anything other than smearing Wilbur, Schreiber and Mason and defending Mattie Mason. One of the main themes in this book is Nathan's insistence that no abuse was perpetrated on Shirley Mason as a child. The rapes on the kitchen table? That was just a memory of when she was forcibly held down and given ether in order to put her under for a toncillectomy. The ice-water enemas? Well, she was probably given enemas as a child as a health aid (Seventh Day Adventists were really into health food and colon-cleansing and the like) and it was probably an unpleasant experience, but that's not abuse. Mattie defecating on lawns? Mattie indulging in "lesbian orgies" with local girls? Never happened. In Nathans's view they never happened because there nobody ever said or did anything about it. Obviously Nathan doesn't know anything about the inertia and apathy of small towns. Freqently sordid, illegal goings-on occur in small towns and nobody does a thing about it and people pretend not to notice. So just because nobody yelled from the rooftops "Mattie Masons takes dumps on lawns!" doesn't mean it couldn't have happened. Same with the sexual misconduct; child molestation and illicit sex happens in small towns, even pious ones, and it's quite often ignored and disregarded. Nathan's attempts to vindicate Mattie are laughable at times. She recounts how Shirley and Dr. Wilbur paid visits to people who knew Shirley during her childhood, some quite close to her. None of them say anything about Mattie pooping on lawns, or "lesbian orgies" or child abuse of any kind. She offers this of proof that the "demonization" of Mattie Mason was all lies. Does Nathan think that one of Shirley's friends would in polite conversation say something like "oh I remember your mother, how she used to masturbate youngs girls" or "oh you poor dear, your mother was so mean to you, raping you with flashlights and bottles?" Again, Nathan believes that if nobody said or did anything about Mattie's atrocities they must not have happened. Nathan apparently knows nothing about how child abuse can be quite blatant and yet no one will do anything about it; not doctors, not teachers, not family members. Nathan should read "A Death In White Bear Lake" by Barry Siegel. It tells the appalling story of the torture/murder of Dennis Jurgens by his adoptive mother Lois. She poured scalding water on his genitals; doctors treated the strange, unnatural injury, but did nothing to investigate the cause. Lois Jurgen's family members saw her beating him mercilessly, saw her force-feeding him his own vomit, saw the child covered in bruises, getting thinner and sicker until she finally killed him when he was three years old. Nathan obviously doesn't know that just because the abuse of a child isn't reported or talked about doesn't mean the abuse isn't happening or didn't happen. Another disturbing aspect of "Sybil, Exposed" is how Nathan tries her best to depict Connie Wilbur and Shirley Mason in some kind of lesbian relationship. She says when they first met there was "instant mutual attraction", that Shirley had a "crush" on Wilbur, that Shirley "burned with desire for the doctor to pat and hug her." She says that during a session Wilbur told Shirley "here, turn over" and says "we'll feel nice soft hands...doesn't that feel good?" Then this: "Connie stroked Shirley's body." She practically rubs the reader's face in her attempt to make Wilbur and Mason into lesbian lovers. In fact, she quotes a friend of Schreiber's as bellowing "What the hell! You're dealing with a psychiatrist who is obviously having a lesbian relationship with this girl!" Why doesn't Nathan have the guts to outright say what she means? What she means is that in addition to all the MPD fraud, Wilbur was also in lesbian love with Shirley Mason and vice versa. Nathan really outdoes herself in her quest to make Wilbur and Mason as grotesque as possible. A psychiatric patient in love with her psychiatrist and the psychiatrist encouraging that love and reciprocating it; really, how low can Nathan go? As low as she possibly can, apparently. Despite praise that this book is "well-researched" I don't put much faith in what it has to say. Debbie Nathan is biased and full of hatred towards the subjects of this book. You can't trust an author like that. I certainly don't. This is a very BAD book.

I found M's Nathan's book incredibly interesting. I remember when the book

So everybody jump on the bandwagon there's another book denying the reality of multiple personality well, it's called Dissociative Identity Disorder now, the MPD label was dropped back in 1994. This time it's the new book by Debbie Nathan called "Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case". In interviews, Nathan states she has fact-checked the book and done years of research so I think to myself, much of it must be true right? Well, if it was, in a way yes - facts are facts. But the presentation of the facts can be in such a way as to make them seem more grandiose or less depending on what the author wants you to believe. My first and continuing thought in all of this is "Why does this author want to write a book that could hurt so many people?" I have my thoughts on this but never find the answer in the book. It begins in the introduction that "Debbie Nathan gives proof that the allegedly true story was largely fabricated." and goes onto build what looks like a horror story of ghoulish proportions. It portends to have all the makings of a great fiction book; greed, sex, gore and maybe that's what this book was in all actuality - Fiction Throughout the book you meet the individuals of the person known as Sybil, Dr. Cornelia Wilbur (her Psychiatrist) and Flora Rheta Schreiber (the person who writes the book Sybil). The style is confusing. The way she moves between people it's not easy to connect the dots unless you actually take her at her word that this is truth. Some of the historic facts about the women are rather interesting (if it is true). Learning about how they grew up and what challenges they faced actually made the book Sybil more believable to me. Unfortunately, what I see is pieces of truth, interwoven with statements of the author's opinion and comments made to capture the reader with a sense of disgust. For example, when the author discusses the "truth" of Dr. Wilbur taking part in the early days of performing lobotomies, she uses this description, "Now she was also drilling holes in their skulls and turning their brains into pulp". Anyone familiar with the history of medicine knows that the practice of medicine has come a long way from its early days. Remember blood-letting (using leeches to drain people's blood to cure disease). The author takes facts out of context and makes them seem like you should be aghast. The author continues this theme throughout the book even into her notes pages. For example, instead of saying "Mason's diary entry" she uses the terminology "All so-called diary material". This shows the disbelief and utter disdain the author has for Sybil although she will tell you that she believes that she was misguided and used by Dr. Wilbur and Flora Rheta Shreiber. The author does not only try to debunk the Sybil story, she appears to have an agenda against anyone that believes in D.I.D or what she calls MPD/DID. Even in her epilogue, she takes to task the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD) and some of its major contributors. Ironically, as I was doing research on the veracity of the book, I came across quite a heated debate between the author and members of the ISSTD. The author had been accused of portraying things improperly in the book and was not taking criticism well. This includes the fact that since the book has been out people are fact-checking the book and finding major errors in her work. A specific reference I can quote is one where she misquotes someone from the ISSTD. This person has written a letter advising what she actually stated to the author. All in all, if you read the book critically and don't buy into the author's manipulation of facts and remember that none of the three woman she tries to condemn are here to dispute any of her claims, I think the book actually can be taken one of two ways... either as a really good book of fiction itself OR as proof that Sybil was true and that her primary guide through this thing we now know as D.I.D. did they very best she could knowing the time in which she experienced the things she did. Otherwise, don't get caught up in all of the out of context "facts", the glaring agendas and the inflammatory language. If you want to use this to fire yourself up... buy it but do so in real copy -- it's very hard to note and verify notes in the Kindle version. Better yet, get it from the library so you don't have to give her any more cash. It's not worth it. Otherwise, stick to something better because this really isn't worth the trouble.

I first read SYBIL in 1976 when I was told, the soon to be aired TV movies principle character, Sybil, was in fact, Shirley Mason, my grandmothers step daughter. Closer to home, Shirley\Sybil was my babysitter in the late 40's and early 50's, in Denver Co. The Masons had been friends of the family for years before my Grandma, Florence, married Walter Mason, Shirley's dad. I especially remember Shirley taking requests to draw cute pictures for my older brother and me. When my grandmother died in 1985, I retrieved about 200 letters destined for the trash, written by Shirley to my Grandma from 1954 - 1974. After reading the letters, lets just say there were discrepancies with the book, SYBIL. Subsequently several researchers contacted me, such as Peter Swales, expressing concern over the ethics and rampant diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder (DID). Debbie Nathan is not the first to come across this controversy, but she is the first to present it to the public, since Peter Swales and Mikkel Borch-Jacobson elected to publish it in a more academic forum in France. Debbie Nathan has been extremely accurate and careful with the documents I have entrusted to her. She doesn't claim to be, or have to be a psychotherapist to be a good investigative reporter. To me that's just what she is, and in some ways better equipped to deal with this controversy. SYBIL EXPOSSED is not written by a wanna-be psychotherapist dispensing her biased opinions. This is a 282 page condensation of facts gleaned from documents, letters, case files, and interviews, most of which have only been open to the public, or otherwise available, for just the last 13 years. I am grateful for such a compilation. If you look at the footnotes in the back of the book, you'll find thirty-five pages itemizing 580 document citations averaging 30 per chapter to back up her "opinions". SYBIL EXPOSSED is a must read for anyone who read SYBIL, but also for anyone who loves a great biography, a shared look at three women fatefully tied together. SYBIL EXPOSSED never faulted Dr. Wilbur for not loving and caring for Shirley\Sybil. Neither did it claim that DID does not exist. After 35 years of fallout, I believe from what I've learned and what this book shows, is Dr. Wilbur's human nature overruled her professionalism and determined her judgments. Read it for yourself, you may not like your conclusions, but truth still matters. No book dealing with beliefs and maters of the mind is going to be 100% black or white, right or wrong. I believe SYBIL EXPOSED is much closer to the truth.

If you're looking for a potboiler like the book Sybil, you might find Sybil Exposed dry reading. If so, here's a sexed-up summary: an unsavory psychiatrist gets hold of a nice but troubled young woman, preys on her need for attention, and turns her into a drug addict and makes her dependent on her in her quest for money and recognition. An unscrupulous author makes them out to be heroines. This, as my mother put it, is the story that should be made into a TV movie. On the other hand, if you enjoy critical thinking, debunking, and digging into the facts, this book is up your alley. Author Debbie Nathan researched Sybil through previous interviews with her friends and family (some earlier researchers had uncovered Sybil's identity) and records that were recently unsealed. She brings to light the disturbing motives and methods of Sybil's psychiatrist (go to Google Scholar and enter wilbur and lobotomy) and Flora Rheta Schreiber, the author of the book Sybil. However, Nathan doesn't paint anyone as purely selfish or innocent: Wilbur devoted a lot of time and effort to her patients and seemed to think she was doing the right thing. Sybil wrote a long confession recanting her multiple personalities and accusations of abuse. Schreiber, the author of the original book Sybil, was once a serious young woman. Schreiber's own fact checking of Sybil's story should have ended her book project. Poking around Sybil's home town, she heard nobody mention Sybil's mother defecating on lawns or having lesbian orgies in the woods. There were no woods around the town. Sybil's childhood doctor was long dead and his patients' records destroyed. None of Sybil's friends in New York remembered her breaking glass or dissociating, except for her roommate, who'd been briefed on Sybil's condition. The book has many more examples like these. It's hard to prove something never happened, but when so many elements of a story don't check out, the story is probably false. Why dig into the story after all these years? Because the truth matters. The book is a reminder to use our critical thinking, explore alternative hypotheses and avoid putting ourselves in the hands of a guru.

"Connie Wilbur called herself a scientist, but science warns against professing certainty, especially about something as subjective as the study of human behavior. If Sybil teaches us anything, it is that we should never accept easy answers or quick explanations. Knowledge in medicine changes constantly, and anyone unprepared to welcome the changes and test them is not to be trusted." When I initially read Sybil in the late 1970s, I was shocked and horrified. That is nothing compared to how shocked I was after reading this book. Dr. Connie Wilbur was one of the first female psychiatrists in American history, having received her medical degree in 1939. She was Shirley Mason's (Sybil's) therapist for over a decade and a driving force behind having Multiple Personality Disorders (MPD) or what is now called Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) declared an entry in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Despite being listed in the DSM, there is still quite a bit of controversy about diagnosis of the disorder. Nathan's book will add another argument for those psychiatrists and laypeople who are doubtful about a diagnosis of DID. Dr Wilbur's 'evidence' and 'research' on DID is shown as startling unethical, inconsistent, and shockingly disturbing for the field of research, but especially research on a psychiatric disorder. If there is such a disorder formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder, Wilber's lack of ethical research practices places unfair doubt on those who suffer from the disorder. If there is no such disorder, then Wilber's research has helped to perpetuate an entire industry of a misdiagnosed individuals, untold financial costs, and family and friends' lives ripped apart. If you are looking for salacious details and shocking revelations about Dr. Wilbur, Flora Schreiber and Sybil, including details about her life and disorder - this book has them. However, what I see as the most important message in this book is in the quote that I opened this review with. To make the narrative all the more cautionary, may I suggest the following change: "Knowledge in...[science]...changes constantly, and anyone unprepared to welcome the changes and test them is not to be trusted". Caveat - I am not a therapist, nor doctor but just a curious grad student conducting my own (non-medical) research. The unethical manner in which Sybil was treated and the research was conducted shook me to the core. I also do not believe or disbelieve the validity of MPD/DID. **Edited to change "psychologist to psychiatrist".

This is a complicated book that will elicit vastly different responses from different constituencies. Those who think multiple personality disorder/dissociative disorder is hogwash will feel vindicated. Those who support the false memory position will feel validated. Those who espouse a feminist understanding of the plight of women in the mid-2oth century will feel that a valuable understanding has been offered. However, those who are aware of the science involved in these areas will feel that the author has simply bypassed a wealth of data that establishes both the validity of multiple personality disorder/dissociative identity disorder and the possibility that some (but certainly not all) recovered memories can be documented as accurate. Those who knew Wilbur and some of the other older and more contemporary figures attacked in this book will be concerned that they have been represented selectively and in a slanted manner, leading to their being, on the whole, misrepresented. While some may see Nathan's critique of a contemporary figure's case conference as proof of their worst fears about those who work with dissociative disorders and childhood trauma today, those who have read that person's commentaries on various blogs and Ms. Nathan's responses appreciate that Ms. Nathan has admitted taking confidential material she was obligated to turn in, taping a case conference for which taping had been forbidden, and placing elements of that person's patient's confidential material in her book. Such actions, if they were done by a physician or psychologist, would be ethical breaches and grounds for major disciplinary action. In attending such a conference, Ms. Nathan was obligated to play by those rules, but she did not. In her book, Ms. Nathan challenges this person's presenting very dramatic abuse scenarios without questioning their reality, and notes that the audience let these go by unchallenged. There is a big problem here. The person who presented the case began by not only reiterating the confidentiality of the material and that it was not permissible to either take the handouts out of the workshop setting because they had to be returned and destroyed, and by emphatically stating taping was forbidden. That person also told the audience that since the majority of the dramatic memories had been confirmed by reliable sources or legal or other records, he would not be discussing issues of the credibility of the patient's memories in this presentation. Ms. Nathan's account omits these background factors, and just makes this person look bad because he did not question the patient's memory. I am a mental health professional, and I was there. I heard the announcements. They were clear, unmistakable, and repeated. To the ethical issues must be added the inaccuracy of the reporting, and the curious way that it was slanted. Given this, all constituencies that would like to see this book as an important document from any particular perspective must take into account that perhaps what is said in this book may not be as objective an account as it purports to be. Wilbur and Schreiber, whatever the truth of what transpired, cannot defend themselves, and Nathan has demonstrated that her reporting and analyses are, at least on some occasions, far from objective. The reader cannot be sure where fact, opinion, and speculation begin and end, and whether what is represented is represented accurately. The discerning reader must be ironically grateful to Ms. Nathan for extending her critical diatribes to include those who can and may choose to fight back against the way that they were misrepresented. The future of this book may reside more in courses on journalistic ethics than in the literature on multiple personality/dissociative identity disorder.

Debbie Nathan is a journalist. Journalists write about and report on a variety of persons, topics, and subjects, none of which requires that they be an "expert" in the area being reported on. The job of a competent journalist is to gather information from a variety of sources and relay that information into some cohesive whole. I feel that Debbie Nathan wrote an accessible book on a very complicated case. It is best if the journalist avoids personal bias in their writing. In this regard, I am challenged by the inclusion of satanic ritual abuse. It is unclear whether Sybil was the catalyst for the increased reporting of this form of sex torture. The book, Sybil, must be given credit for putting a spotlight on the severe and lasting impact of child abuse in any form. The mind is capable of many creative coping mechanisms. Becoming a multiple may be a manner of coping for some severely abused persons. Above all, Sybil Exposed is a cautionary tale. A good therapist must maintain healthy and strict boundaries in and out of sessions with clients. Shirley Mason was an emotionally fragile individual with low self-esteem and a strong need for love and attention. The challenges that brought her to therapy, made her vulnerable to the manipulations of a powerful, intelligent and fame-seeking therapist, whose boundaries with her patient were practically non-existent. Her unethical treatment cannot simply be dismissed with the excuse of ancient treatment protocols. Her treatment methods taint every aspect of her work with Shirley Mason, including diagnosis and cure. *On a strictly personal note, I am immediately skeptical of reviewers and comments that accuse Debbie Nathan of an agenda and then direct readers to their website, vanity press book or appear to seek some other form of personal gain or validation from their input.

I grew up with the tv movie and read the book by Flora Shrieber several times, the story of Sybil Dorsett was so haunting and Sally Field was a marvel in the movie. When I heard that it could have all been untrue I didn't want to believe it, after all none of the "players" are alive to defend themselves and...well I don't know, I wanted it to be true. I realized though that wanting such a horrible thing to be true was wrong so I bought the Kindle edition and started reading. It was very interesting as I knew absolutely nothing about Dr. Wilbur's background and was uneducated as to the treatment/problems of hysteria in women during the 30's. Flora's book does not give an accurate account of all the psychotropic drugs that Sybil was on, which in and of themselves caused blackouts, dizziness and left her extremely vulnerable to suggestions by Dr. WIlbur. The doctor was determined to make a name for herself as she had a father and grandfather who were exceptionally brilliant scientists- one of them told her that she was not smart enough to become a scientist herself. My advice is that anyone interested in this subject should read this book and decide for themselves. It seems that Sybil's case was the driving force behind that whole repressed memory wave in the 80's and innocent daycare workers being falsely accused of sexual abuse, also parents of grown children were being told that they had molested their daughters during satanic rituals! I remember all those things and it was so awful... Thank heavens those horrible things didn't actually happen to Sybil. NO doubt there was some abuse but nothing like what she reported under the effects of the drugs...

There may be spoilers here... * * * Sybil (the original) was one of the most influential books of my young adulthood. It made me consider psychiatry or counseling as a career. Later, as books like "The Courage to Heal" and others came out, and controversy over false memories ensued, I felt that at least "Sybil" was the truth. Even when debate arose after her death, indicating that the multiple personalities were a fabrication, I still believed that the horrific childhood abuse had taken place. Given that, it was no wonder that Shirley Mason dissociated, even if the 16 personalities were a ploy to remain in therapy. But there was so much more than that, and it's horrifying to learn that Mason's main problems were actually induced by her psychiatrist, who was determined to be honored for some historic breakthrough. If Debbie Nathan's account is to be believed, Cornelia Wilbur was the abuser, not Mason's mother. A co-conspirator, albeit a regretful one, was Flora Schreiber, who wrote the original book. Schreiber, like Wilbur, wanted fame, and to be part of something historic. She realized that Wilbur was a problematic personality, but ignored her own misgivings while the book was being written and published. I still pity Shirley Mason as an abuse victim. but now for very different reasons. The only concern I have is that somewhere down the line I will learn that this account was fabricated as well. Once you experience this type of betrayal, even at a reader's distancce, it's hard to be credulous again. That's probably not a bad thing.

This book is crummy on so many levels it's hard to know where to begin, but here goes. First things first: Debbie Nathan has an agenda, no, make that an AGENDA. And that agenda is to prove that the story of "Sybil" is completely, entirely fake and that the creators of "Sybil" (Connie Wilbur, Flora Rheta Schreiber and Shirley Mason) were three contemptible liars whose actions caused untold miseries for millions of people due to their bogus tales of child abuse that never happened and the grave psychiatric condition that supposedly resulted from it. In Nathan's opinion "Sybil" is the direct cause of false memory syndrome, "satanic panic" and a myriad of other psychiatric frauds and misconducts. She holds Wilbur, Schreiber and Mason all personally responsible for doing unfathomable harm to others by creating this silly, nonexistent psychiatric diagnosis called Multiple Personality Disorder. Make no mistake about it: Nathan HATES these women. Her anger and disgust leap off every page. Her grudge gets tiresome very quickly; it's boring and mind-numbing to keep hearing how awful Wilbur, Schrieber and poor Shirley Mason were. Nathan gloats about what she perceives are their "failures" and even takes potshots at the way they look! Let it be said that I never believed that "Sybil" was 100% fact. I always thought it was fact mixed with fiction, as most "true" books are. And I always thought that the descriptions of Sybil's disassociation into her "selves" were probably exaggerated. But I did and do believe that something went on in Shirley Mason's life that caused her lifelong mental and physical anguish; I think it was part environment and part heredity that made her anorexic, nervous, subject to tics and fainting spells and bizarre behavior. But Nathan will have none of this; she reiterates over and over that Mason was NOT abused. Oh sure, she grew up in a stifling religious environment that prohibited its members from even having an imagination, because anything imagined is sinful, but that's not really abuse, at least not in Nathan's mind. Her mother was pathologically overprotective and possessive and "odd; her father was a milquetoast who paid little attention to her and let the domineering Mattie be the one always in control. That does not constitute abuse to her, either. And her lifelong anorexia and other physical problems? Her lifelong mental issues? Although Nathan admits to being "no doctor", she claims that Shirley Mason's troubles were all the result of something called "pernicious anemia...an inborn lack of ability to some people to process Vitamin B12." Well, if that were so then why did Mason's symptoms improve (her physical ones, anyway) when she was given injections of hog's liver? If she were unable to process vitamin B, it would seem to me that the injections would have had little effect. There was also the meatless diet she was forced to eat (her religion forbade eating meat; eating meat was supposed to be "sinful") and her anorexia. Those factors would have contributed to her anemia. It appears that she COULD process vitamin B, but most of the time lacked getting it in food or supplements. That "pernicious anemia" theory...well, Nathan claims that Connie Wilbur herself blurted out Mason's TRUE malady during an innocuous Q & A session. When asked how Sybil was doing, Connie's "brief, almost throwaway" answer was that Sybil had lived a long time without much energy due to "pernicious anemia." "No one stopped to think about the bombshell Connie had revealed", Nathan says. In Nathan's mind, the "bombshell" was that Connie had inadvertently exposed the REAL reason for all of Shirley Mason's mental and physical disablities. Nathan seized on those two words, pernicious anemia: "AH HA! So THAT'S it! That's the reason for every symptom, mental and physical, that Shirley and Mattie Mason every had! The truth has been revealed!" Hmm...Nathan goes to quite a lot of effort to discredit Connie Wilbur; throughout the book Wilbur is portrayed as a liar, a fraud, an unprincipled woman out to achieve her own aims no matter what she had to do to succeed. And yet Nathan wholeheartedly believes that Wilbur's "throwaway" answer is the gospel truth, the revelation that Nathan has been seeking. I think Wilbur meant nothing more than saying Shirley Mason was anemic, and didn't really care to elaborate. Why do that? Mason was a frail anorexic; of course she'd be prone to anemia. But, as usual, Nathan twists facts and events to shore up her own relentless agenda, to make it seem like all of Shirley Mason's (and her mother's) problems stemmed from a PHYSICAL condition, not a mental one. Nathan spends a great deal of time defending Mattie Mason. She admits that Mattie Mason, was strange, odd, nervous, manic. She admits that she was so overprotective of Shirley (smothering, really) that she walked her to school every day, holding her hand, even though the school was right near their house. She did this even when Shirley was a teenager. She concedes that Mattie had a screeching laugh and that she would get what she called "the blues" so bad she would be mute and motionless for long periods of time (sounds like catatonia to me). Neighbors recalled her peering into the windows of other people's houses. She says that people who knew her described her as "a little strange, but nice." She doesn't sound that "nice" to me, but she does sound really, REALLY "strange." In fact, she sounds like she was very mentally disturbed. One of the reasons I read this book was because I wanted to know more about all the principles in the story: Wilbur, Sybil/Shirley, and her parents Mattie and Walter. But they seem made of cardboard in this book; Nathan gives the reader no insight into their personalities at all, I guess because she's just concerned with the surface of things and has no interest in doing anything other than smearing Wilbur, Schreiber and Mason and defending Mattie Mason. One of the main themes in this book is Nathan's insistence that no abuse was perpetrated on Shirley Mason as a child. The rapes on the kitchen table? That was just a memory of when she was forcibly held down and given ether in order to put her under for a toncillectomy. The ice-water enemas? Well, she was probably given enemas as a child as a health aid (Seventh Day Adventists were really into health food and colon-cleansing and the like) and it was probably an unpleasant experience, but that's not abuse. Mattie defecating on lawns? Mattie indulging in "lesbian orgies" with local girls? Never happened. In Nathans's view they never happened because there nobody ever said or did anything about it. Obviously Nathan doesn't know anything about the inertia and apathy of small towns. Freqently sordid, illegal goings-on occur in small towns and nobody does a thing about it and people pretend not to notice. So just because nobody yelled from the rooftops "Mattie Masons takes dumps on lawns!" doesn't mean it couldn't have happened. Same with the sexual misconduct; child molestation and illicit sex happens in small towns, even pious ones, and it's quite often ignored and disregarded. Nathan's attempts to vindicate Mattie are laughable at times. She recounts how Shirley and Dr. Wilbur paid visits to people who knew Shirley during her childhood, some quite close to her. None of them say anything about Mattie pooping on lawns, or "lesbian orgies" or child abuse of any kind. She offers this of proof that the "demonization" of Mattie Mason was all lies. Does Nathan think that one of Shirley's friends would in polite conversation say something like "oh I remember your mother, how she used to masturbate youngs girls" or "oh you poor dear, your mother was so mean to you, raping you with flashlights and bottles?" Again, Nathan believes that if nobody said or did anything about Mattie's atrocities they must not have happened. Nathan apparently knows nothing about how child abuse can be quite blatant and yet no one will do anything about it; not doctors, not teachers, not family members. Nathan should read "A Death In White Bear Lake" by Barry Siegel. It tells the appalling story of the torture/murder of Dennis Jurgens by his adoptive mother Lois. She poured scalding water on his genitals; doctors treated the strange, unnatural injury, but did nothing to investigate the cause. Lois Jurgen's family members saw her beating him mercilessly, saw her force-feeding him his own vomit, saw the child covered in bruises, getting thinner and sicker until she finally killed him when he was three years old. Nathan obviously doesn't know that just because the abuse of a child isn't reported or talked about doesn't mean the abuse isn't happening or didn't happen. Another disturbing aspect of "Sybil, Exposed" is how Nathan tries her best to depict Connie Wilbur and Shirley Mason in some kind of lesbian relationship. She says when they first met there was "instant mutual attraction", that Shirley had a "crush" on Wilbur, that Shirley "burned with desire for the doctor to pat and hug her." She says that during a session Wilbur told Shirley "here, turn over" and says "we'll feel nice soft hands...doesn't that feel good?" Then this: "Connie stroked Shirley's body." She practically rubs the reader's face in her attempt to make Wilbur and Mason into lesbian lovers. In fact, she quotes a friend of Schreiber's as bellowing "What the hell! You're dealing with a psychiatrist who is obviously having a lesbian relationship with this girl!" Why doesn't Nathan have the guts to outright say what she means? What she means is that in addition to all the MPD fraud, Wilbur was also in lesbian love with Shirley Mason and vice versa. Nathan really outdoes herself in her quest to make Wilbur and Mason as grotesque as possible. A psychiatric patient in love with her psychiatrist and the psychiatrist encouraging that love and reciprocating it; really, how low can Nathan go? As low as she possibly can, apparently. Despite praise that this book is "well-researched" I don't put much faith in what it has to say. Debbie Nathan is biased and full of hatred towards the subjects of this book. You can't trust an author like that. I certainly don't. This is a very BAD book.

I found M's Nathan's book incredibly interesting. I remember when the book

So everybody jump on the bandwagon there's another book denying the reality of multiple personality well, it's called Dissociative Identity Disorder now, the MPD label was dropped back in 1994. This time it's the new book by Debbie Nathan called "Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case". In interviews, Nathan states she has fact-checked the book and done years of research so I think to myself, much of it must be true right? Well, if it was, in a way yes - facts are facts. But the presentation of the facts can be in such a way as to make them seem more grandiose or less depending on what the author wants you to believe. My first and continuing thought in all of this is "Why does this author want to write a book that could hurt so many people?" I have my thoughts on this but never find the answer in the book. It begins in the introduction that "Debbie Nathan gives proof that the allegedly true story was largely fabricated." and goes onto build what looks like a horror story of ghoulish proportions. It portends to have all the makings of a great fiction book; greed, sex, gore and maybe that's what this book was in all actuality - Fiction Throughout the book you meet the individuals of the person known as Sybil, Dr. Cornelia Wilbur (her Psychiatrist) and Flora Rheta Schreiber (the person who writes the book Sybil). The style is confusing. The way she moves between people it's not easy to connect the dots unless you actually take her at her word that this is truth. Some of the historic facts about the women are rather interesting (if it is true). Learning about how they grew up and what challenges they faced actually made the book Sybil more believable to me. Unfortunately, what I see is pieces of truth, interwoven with statements of the author's opinion and comments made to capture the reader with a sense of disgust. For example, when the author discusses the "truth" of Dr. Wilbur taking part in the early days of performing lobotomies, she uses this description, "Now she was also drilling holes in their skulls and turning their brains into pulp". Anyone familiar with the history of medicine knows that the practice of medicine has come a long way from its early days. Remember blood-letting (using leeches to drain people's blood to cure disease). The author takes facts out of context and makes them seem like you should be aghast. The author continues this theme throughout the book even into her notes pages. For example, instead of saying "Mason's diary entry" she uses the terminology "All so-called diary material". This shows the disbelief and utter disdain the author has for Sybil although she will tell you that she believes that she was misguided and used by Dr. Wilbur and Flora Rheta Shreiber. The author does not only try to debunk the Sybil story, she appears to have an agenda against anyone that believes in D.I.D or what she calls MPD/DID. Even in her epilogue, she takes to task the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD) and some of its major contributors. Ironically, as I was doing research on the veracity of the book, I came across quite a heated debate between the author and members of the ISSTD. The author had been accused of portraying things improperly in the book and was not taking criticism well. This includes the fact that since the book has been out people are fact-checking the book and finding major errors in her work. A specific reference I can quote is one where she misquotes someone from the ISSTD. This person has written a letter advising what she actually stated to the author. All in all, if you read the book critically and don't buy into the author's manipulation of facts and remember that none of the three woman she tries to condemn are here to dispute any of her claims, I think the book actually can be taken one of two ways... either as a really good book of fiction itself OR as proof that Sybil was true and that her primary guide through this thing we now know as D.I.D. did they very best she could knowing the time in which she experienced the things she did. Otherwise, don't get caught up in all of the out of context "facts", the glaring agendas and the inflammatory language. If you want to use this to fire yourself up... buy it but do so in real copy -- it's very hard to note and verify notes in the Kindle version. Better yet, get it from the library so you don't have to give her any more cash. It's not worth it. Otherwise, stick to something better because this really isn't worth the trouble.

I first read SYBIL in 1976 when I was told, the soon to be aired TV movies principle character, Sybil, was in fact, Shirley Mason, my grandmothers step daughter. Closer to home, Shirley\Sybil was my babysitter in the late 40's and early 50's, in Denver Co. The Masons had been friends of the family for years before my Grandma, Florence, married Walter Mason, Shirley's dad. I especially remember Shirley taking requests to draw cute pictures for my older brother and me. When my grandmother died in 1985, I retrieved about 200 letters destined for the trash, written by Shirley to my Grandma from 1954 - 1974. After reading the letters, lets just say there were discrepancies with the book, SYBIL. Subsequently several researchers contacted me, such as Peter Swales, expressing concern over the ethics and rampant diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder (DID). Debbie Nathan is not the first to come across this controversy, but she is the first to present it to the public, since Peter Swales and Mikkel Borch-Jacobson elected to publish it in a more academic forum in France. Debbie Nathan has been extremely accurate and careful with the documents I have entrusted to her. She doesn't claim to be, or have to be a psychotherapist to be a good investigative reporter. To me that's just what she is, and in some ways better equipped to deal with this controversy. SYBIL EXPOSSED is not written by a wanna-be psychotherapist dispensing her biased opinions. This is a 282 page condensation of facts gleaned from documents, letters, case files, and interviews, most of which have only been open to the public, or otherwise available, for just the last 13 years. I am grateful for such a compilation. If you look at the footnotes in the back of the book, you'll find thirty-five pages itemizing 580 document citations averaging 30 per chapter to back up her "opinions". SYBIL EXPOSSED is a must read for anyone who read SYBIL, but also for anyone who loves a great biography, a shared look at three women fatefully tied together. SYBIL EXPOSSED never faulted Dr. Wilbur for not loving and caring for Shirley\Sybil. Neither did it claim that DID does not exist. After 35 years of fallout, I believe from what I've learned and what this book shows, is Dr. Wilbur's human nature overruled her professionalism and determined her judgments. Read it for yourself, you may not like your conclusions, but truth still matters. No book dealing with beliefs and maters of the mind is going to be 100% black or white, right or wrong. I believe SYBIL EXPOSED is much closer to the truth.

If you're looking for a potboiler like the book Sybil, you might find Sybil Exposed dry reading. If so, here's a sexed-up summary: an unsavory psychiatrist gets hold of a nice but troubled young woman, preys on her need for attention, and turns her into a drug addict and makes her dependent on her in her quest for money and recognition. An unscrupulous author makes them out to be heroines. This, as my mother put it, is the story that should be made into a TV movie. On the other hand, if you enjoy critical thinking, debunking, and digging into the facts, this book is up your alley. Author Debbie Nathan researched Sybil through previous interviews with her friends and family (some earlier researchers had uncovered Sybil's identity) and records that were recently unsealed. She brings to light the disturbing motives and methods of Sybil's psychiatrist (go to Google Scholar and enter wilbur and lobotomy) and Flora Rheta Schreiber, the author of the book Sybil. However, Nathan doesn't paint anyone as purely selfish or innocent: Wilbur devoted a lot of time and effort to her patients and seemed to think she was doing the right thing. Sybil wrote a long confession recanting her multiple personalities and accusations of abuse. Schreiber, the author of the original book Sybil, was once a serious young woman. Schreiber's own fact checking of Sybil's story should have ended her book project. Poking around Sybil's home town, she heard nobody mention Sybil's mother defecating on lawns or having lesbian orgies in the woods. There were no woods around the town. Sybil's childhood doctor was long dead and his patients' records destroyed. None of Sybil's friends in New York remembered her breaking glass or dissociating, except for her roommate, who'd been briefed on Sybil's condition. The book has many more examples like these. It's hard to prove something never happened, but when so many elements of a story don't check out, the story is probably false. Why dig into the story after all these years? Because the truth matters. The book is a reminder to use our critical thinking, explore alternative hypotheses and avoid putting ourselves in the hands of a guru.

"Connie Wilbur called herself a scientist, but science warns against professing certainty, especially about something as subjective as the study of human behavior. If Sybil teaches us anything, it is that we should never accept easy answers or quick explanations. Knowledge in medicine changes constantly, and anyone unprepared to welcome the changes and test them is not to be trusted." When I initially read Sybil in the late 1970s, I was shocked and horrified. That is nothing compared to how shocked I was after reading this book. Dr. Connie Wilbur was one of the first female psychiatrists in American history, having received her medical degree in 1939. She was Shirley Mason's (Sybil's) therapist for over a decade and a driving force behind having Multiple Personality Disorders (MPD) or what is now called Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) declared an entry in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Despite being listed in the DSM, there is still quite a bit of controversy about diagnosis of the disorder. Nathan's book will add another argument for those psychiatrists and laypeople who are doubtful about a diagnosis of DID. Dr Wilbur's 'evidence' and 'research' on DID is shown as startling unethical, inconsistent, and shockingly disturbing for the field of research, but especially research on a psychiatric disorder. If there is such a disorder formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder, Wilber's lack of ethical research practices places unfair doubt on those who suffer from the disorder. If there is no such disorder, then Wilber's research has helped to perpetuate an entire industry of a misdiagnosed individuals, untold financial costs, and family and friends' lives ripped apart. If you are looking for salacious details and shocking revelations about Dr. Wilbur, Flora Schreiber and Sybil, including details about her life and disorder - this book has them. However, what I see as the most important message in this book is in the quote that I opened this review with. To make the narrative all the more cautionary, may I suggest the following change: "Knowledge in...[science]...changes constantly, and anyone unprepared to welcome the changes and test them is not to be trusted". Caveat - I am not a therapist, nor doctor but just a curious grad student conducting my own (non-medical) research. The unethical manner in which Sybil was treated and the research was conducted shook me to the core. I also do not believe or disbelieve the validity of MPD/DID. **Edited to change "psychologist to psychiatrist".

This is a complicated book that will elicit vastly different responses from different constituencies. Those who think multiple personality disorder/dissociative disorder is hogwash will feel vindicated. Those who support the false memory position will feel validated. Those who espouse a feminist understanding of the plight of women in the mid-2oth century will feel that a valuable understanding has been offered. However, those who are aware of the science involved in these areas will feel that the author has simply bypassed a wealth of data that establishes both the validity of multiple personality disorder/dissociative identity disorder and the possibility that some (but certainly not all) recovered memories can be documented as accurate. Those who knew Wilbur and some of the other older and more contemporary figures attacked in this book will be concerned that they have been represented selectively and in a slanted manner, leading to their being, on the whole, misrepresented. While some may see Nathan's critique of a contemporary figure's case conference as proof of their worst fears about those who work with dissociative disorders and childhood trauma today, those who have read that person's commentaries on various blogs and Ms. Nathan's responses appreciate that Ms. Nathan has admitted taking confidential material she was obligated to turn in, taping a case conference for which taping had been forbidden, and placing elements of that person's patient's confidential material in her book. Such actions, if they were done by a physician or psychologist, would be ethical breaches and grounds for major disciplinary action. In attending such a conference, Ms. Nathan was obligated to play by those rules, but she did not. In her book, Ms. Nathan challenges this person's presenting very dramatic abuse scenarios without questioning their reality, and notes that the audience let these go by unchallenged. There is a big problem here. The person who presented the case began by not only reiterating the confidentiality of the material and that it was not permissible to either take the handouts out of the workshop setting because they had to be returned and destroyed, and by emphatically stating taping was forbidden. That person also told the audience that since the majority of the dramatic memories had been confirmed by reliable sources or legal or other records, he would not be discussing issues of the credibility of the patient's memories in this presentation. Ms. Nathan's account omits these background factors, and just makes this person look bad because he did not question the patient's memory. I am a mental health professional, and I was there. I heard the announcements. They were clear, unmistakable, and repeated. To the ethical issues must be added the inaccuracy of the reporting, and the curious way that it was slanted. Given this, all constituencies that would like to see this book as an important document from any particular perspective must take into account that perhaps what is said in this book may not be as objective an account as it purports to be. Wilbur and Schreiber, whatever the truth of what transpired, cannot defend themselves, and Nathan has demonstrated that her reporting and analyses are, at least on some occasions, far from objective. The reader cannot be sure where fact, opinion, and speculation begin and end, and whether what is represented is represented accurately. The discerning reader must be ironically grateful to Ms. Nathan for extending her critical diatribes to include those who can and may choose to fight back against the way that they were misrepresented. The future of this book may reside more in courses on journalistic ethics than in the literature on multiple personality/dissociative identity disorder.

Debbie Nathan is a journalist. Journalists write about and report on a variety of persons, topics, and subjects, none of which requires that they be an "expert" in the area being reported on. The job of a competent journalist is to gather information from a variety of sources and relay that information into some cohesive whole. I feel that Debbie Nathan wrote an accessible book on a very complicated case. It is best if the journalist avoids personal bias in their writing. In this regard, I am challenged by the inclusion of satanic ritual abuse. It is unclear whether Sybil was the catalyst for the increased reporting of this form of sex torture. The book, Sybil, must be given credit for putting a spotlight on the severe and lasting impact of child abuse in any form. The mind is capable of many creative coping mechanisms. Becoming a multiple may be a manner of coping for some severely abused persons. Above all, Sybil Exposed is a cautionary tale. A good therapist must maintain healthy and strict boundaries in and out of sessions with clients. Shirley Mason was an emotionally fragile individual with low self-esteem and a strong need for love and attention. The challenges that brought her to therapy, made her vulnerable to the manipulations of a powerful, intelligent and fame-seeking therapist, whose boundaries with her patient were practically non-existent. Her unethical treatment cannot simply be dismissed with the excuse of ancient treatment protocols. Her treatment methods taint every aspect of her work with Shirley Mason, including diagnosis and cure. *On a strictly personal note, I am immediately skeptical of reviewers and comments that accuse Debbie Nathan of an agenda and then direct readers to their website, vanity press book or appear to seek some other form of personal gain or validation from their input.

I grew up with the tv movie and read the book by Flora Shrieber several times, the story of Sybil Dorsett was so haunting and Sally Field was a marvel in the movie. When I heard that it could have all been untrue I didn't want to believe it, after all none of the "players" are alive to defend themselves and...well I don't know, I wanted it to be true. I realized though that wanting such a horrible thing to be true was wrong so I bought the Kindle edition and started reading. It was very interesting as I knew absolutely nothing about Dr. Wilbur's background and was uneducated as to the treatment/problems of hysteria in women during the 30's. Flora's book does not give an accurate account of all the psychotropic drugs that Sybil was on, which in and of themselves caused blackouts, dizziness and left her extremely vulnerable to suggestions by Dr. WIlbur. The doctor was determined to make a name for herself as she had a father and grandfather who were exceptionally brilliant scientists- one of them told her that she was not smart enough to become a scientist herself. My advice is that anyone interested in this subject should read this book and decide for themselves. It seems that Sybil's case was the driving force behind that whole repressed memory wave in the 80's and innocent daycare workers being falsely accused of sexual abuse, also parents of grown children were being told that they had molested their daughters during satanic rituals! I remember all those things and it was so awful... Thank heavens those horrible things didn't actually happen to Sybil. NO doubt there was some abuse but nothing like what she reported under the effects of the drugs...

There may be spoilers here... * * * Sybil (the original) was one of the most influential books of my young adulthood. It made me consider psychiatry or counseling as a career. Later, as books like "The Courage to Heal" and others came out, and controversy over false memories ensued, I felt that at least "Sybil" was the truth. Even when debate arose after her death, indicating that the multiple personalities were a fabrication, I still believed that the horrific childhood abuse had taken place. Given that, it was no wonder that Shirley Mason dissociated, even if the 16 personalities were a ploy to remain in therapy. But there was so much more than that, and it's horrifying to learn that Mason's main problems were actually induced by her psychiatrist, who was determined to be honored for some historic breakthrough. If Debbie Nathan's account is to be believed, Cornelia Wilbur was the abuser, not Mason's mother. A co-conspirator, albeit a regretful one, was Flora Schreiber, who wrote the original book. Schreiber, like Wilbur, wanted fame, and to be part of something historic. She realized that Wilbur was a problematic personality, but ignored her own misgivings while the book was being written and published. I still pity Shirley Mason as an abuse victim. but now for very different reasons. The only concern I have is that somewhere down the line I will learn that this account was fabricated as well. Once you experience this type of betrayal, even at a reader's distancce, it's hard to be credulous again. That's probably not a bad thing.

I am obsessed with this book, I've read it several times! Sybil Exposed is brilliant and illuminating. Without going into a detailed review, I want to make a comment. If you're still arguing with yourself about the veracity of Sybil, or if you're overly concerned about the author's bias, and therefore questioning MPD or DID, ask yourself this: If Sybil had been born a male, would the hysteria still have been a diagnosis? What would be different if Sybil had been born male? My answer is MUCH DIFFERENT. After reading this book, and doing much research on my own, and also after a few things that have happened to me, I can say that there is no such thing as a repressed memory that only a therapist can uncover through hypnosis. I remember everything; I never repressed anything! I was very, very young, too! There is no such thing as a part of the brain that can protect the rest of the brain from painful memories. That's hogwash! Another thing I want to mention, I once placed myself in a risky situation as an adult. I remember saying to myself, "What am I doing here?" This morphed in to "Where am I?" Then the thought came to me, "Who am I?" It was very, very scary. For a few seconds, I didn't know where I was or who I was. I don't think that dissociation is a personality or identity disorder, but rather related to a panic attack. This happened to me once and only for a few seconds. It never happened again. Please read this book! When you're finished, read Satan's Silence, about the satanic panic in the early '80s. Nathan wrote that, too.

When I first heard about "Sybil" it was when the made-for-TV movie starring Sally Field and Joanne Woodward first aired. However, I didn't read the book until 1979. Naturally, I thought there must be some truth to it. After all, why would anyone make up something like this? That's what nearly everyone thinks when a "shocking revelation" is published under the classification of "nonfiction." Also, I recall an advertisement in TV Guide magazine for the movie which went like this: "Sybil: Terrifying Because It's True!" However, when I read the book, there were some things that puzzled me. If Sybil/Shirley was raped with sharp objects and her vagina was disfigured, implying that she had suffered lacerations, when wouldn't she need immediate medical attention. How could something like this go on all throughout her early childhood without anyone noticing? And her mother supposedly molested little girls sexually, wouldn't at least one of them tell their parents? How could the mother get away with this for so long unless she threated these children to keep silent about the "horsey games"? And yet the book said nothing about "Hattie" threating the girls to keep silent. Over the years, more information came out that Sybil wasn't exactly true. First there was Dr. Herbert Spiegel's disclosure that Sybil/Shirley was not really a multiple personality and Dr. Wilbur had to ask Dr. Spiegel to hypnotize her patient although the book had Wilbur hypnotizing Sybil without referring her to Dr. Spiegel. Now, finally the truth has come out! Finally, we discover what caused the witch hunt that sprang from this misleading story of Sybil. Debbie Nathan has done a fine job of exposing the fraud that was Sybil, the supposedly battered child to had to split into multiple selves in order to survive!

Ms. Nathan confronts the Multiple Personality Disorder community, or as it is now known, the Disassociative Disorder Community, or DID community, by trying to unravel the strange and unique behavior of the personalities involved in the case of "Sybil", a well known DID whose case was celebrated as a breakthrough when it first came out, and then became the subject of questions. While reading this book, many things appeared to me to be uncertain. Many of the thoughts of those involved in Sybil's case were written as if verbatim, yet these thoughts do not have notes attached as to where they came from. Others have footnotes that indicate that they were taken "in context", but whose context were they taken in? I am sure that there is a lot of information of which I am not aware that would back Ms. Nathan up on some of this, but her discussion of homosexual behavior between some of the participants is, at best, a reach. While there might have been (all of the subjects are dead now, so we cannot ask), what reason is there to bring this up in a book that is written about what is purported to be a fraudulent agreement between people involved? It bears no purpose other than to bring a haze of mystery onto the scene, with a thin layer of innuendo that reeks, to me, of someone saying "If they had an affair, they must have made this stuff up". I believe that this book could have been made better with less fictional conversation (at least conversation and thoughts that seem fictional) and more facts. Ms. Nathan's subjects, many of whom were third and fourth hand (a friend, a cousin, someone who knew someone who knew Sybil, Dr. Wilbur or Ms. Schreiber) seemed to not lend a tone of veracity to the book, as the information seemed to be passed from person to person rather than heard first hand. I understand that the relationship between the three was strained and, in some ways, very codependent, but at the same time, I also feel it could have been handled differently. This, of course, is just my opinion.

I liked the book overall. It had a lot of fascinating information about Shirley Mason aka Sybil of the famous book. While I was surprised to learn about Dr. Wilbur's unethical therapy techniques, I am still not convinced that Sybil is a work of complete fiction. I feel that the reason the book resonates with so many people is because it deals with some fundamental truths about child abuse in our society that would not be acknowledged if not for the book. Whether or not Sybil had multiple personality disorder or not, she obviously had some emotional/mental issues going on and seems to have made some progress with Dr. Wilbur in therapy. However, I agree with Ms. Nathan about Shirley/Sybil probably suffering from a physical illness that was not properly diagnosed and treated, this happens more often then people realize and can contribute to a person being misdiagnosed as mentally ill when they are not. It was sad to read about Shirley/Sybil's unhealthy dependance upon Dr. Wilbur for most of her life. Therefore, I do not think Shirley/Sybil was really cured by Dr. Wilbur who seemed to have problems of her own and was probably not the best person to treat Shirley/Sybil. I also agree that the author of Sybil probably used poetic license with the book. It would have been more factual and truthful if the book had been put in the memoir category with a statement that it was semi-autobiographical in nature. We read memoirs all of the time and this is basically what Sybil is; a very good memoir!

I picked up this book expecting to read a startling expose about a book that enthralled me when I was younger. This book is interesting, but it's far from being a comprehensive re-examination of Shirley Mason's claims. Nathan relies on irrelevant details to tell the story Sybil and the women responsible for writing it. In order to give the illusion of a well- researched backstory, Nathan goes off on tangents that shed little light on Sybil. Nathan tells us the story of Sybil's, aka Shirley Mason's childhood, but how much of this is true and how much is made up is hard to say. Most of the citations given in the chapter on Shirley's childhood are about the history of Seventh Day Adventism and Shirley's church and school records. How accurately can you describe someone's childhood based on the history of their religion and school absentee records? I'm sure the author used some creative license in order to write an easy-to-read account of those three women's lives. Most of the anecdotes regarding Dr. Wilbur's professional career pre-Sybil and alleged misuse of narcosynthesis and electricity are from psychology articles and records. Schreiber's early life is revealed through personal interviews with family and the later citations, for her twenties and beyond, read like a resume. This book neither proves nor disproves Sybil/Shirley Mason had Dissociative Identity Disorder. What you'll get out of this book is a look into the private lives of Shirley Mason, Connie Wilbur and Flora Schrieber, but take it all with a grain of salt.

Journalist Debbie Nathan has made a vitally important contribution to the U.S. legal system, history, culture, and psychology in her extraordinarily well-documented expose' of the psychological machinations of the two women who gave a stunningly credulous world the story of "Sybil." I remember being both horrified and enthralled by the account in the late 70s, and it never occurred to me that what we all read was anything other than true. Maturity and my own experience in therapy would, perhaps, have made me less able to believe the story at face value, but until reading this book I had no idea how dangerously manipulative the "Sybil" author and the patient's psychologist were -- too the patient herself, most importantly, but also to colleagues, other patients, and the world that accepted their story of a woman with 16 different personalities. Nathan exhaustively researches the story and the result is both a biography of enormous importance and a scathing expose' of psychological abuse and trickery whose effect was easily as harmful to the woman we know as Sybil as anything her supposedly deranged mother did. This book is tragic through and through, but much needed in an era in the U.S. that discounts science and elevates ignorance to a virtue. Read it . . . and weep.

Well researched and well written book on a difficult topic - I give the author high marks for exposing the development of one of the worst travesties of the psychiatric community since the age of the lobotomy. That community has yet to respond. The story of how Dr. Wilbur grabbed national attention for MPD with the publication of "Sybil" to fulfill her own professional ambitions is a seedy one. Sybil was only the first victim. Other professionals jumped on the bandwagon leading the 'treatment' that ultimately led to a ballooning of diagnoses that ultimately failed and ruined the lives of thousands of people. Some of these 'professionals' were successfully sued, including for insurance and Medicare fraud (some counseled their clients on how to apply for disability and Medicare therefor paid their bills). Special treatment facilities closed all over the country. But when the scam was exposed, people who had been mis-diagnosed often had nowhere to go; no one wanted to touch MPD/DID out of fear. This book diligently describes how it happened

Having known the principals involved in this story, and being a Psychiatrist myself, who has always had concerns about the Multiple Personality diagnosis, and some of the iatrogenic damage done to highly suggestible patients, by professionals looking for some level of personal/professional success/stardom, no matter how hard I tried, I still felt the author had some axe of her own to grind. Often, personal information about the principals, especially Connie Wilbur, seemed spurious reasons for criticism of her professional activities. I read it twice to compare my emotional and professional reactions in an attempt to check for bias. Watching a presentation on You Tube by the author, which I watched after reading the book, only served to confirm my sense the author had some personal axe to grind. As a psychiatrist, especially during the 80's and even 90's, I too felt there was indeed a hysterical contagion effect that indeed harmed both some patients and their families. The writings of Charcot talk about "the grande hysteric", long before the upsurge created by Connie Wilbur. I think a more academic and less polemic study would have better served the hysteric contagion of this diagnosis. Why were so many willing to "jump" on the diagnostic boat, and yet there were and are many in the field who argued cogently against the "rush to judgment". There's not much discussion about this accept by a few personal colleagues of Dr. Wilbur's, which seems to function only as proof of what an unscrupulous person she was. Although the author is not herself a Psychiatrist, a more balanced thesis with less emphasis on cutting Connie Wilbur down to size, would have been more educational and useful. ( By the way, Dr. Wilbur and I parted ways professionally and personally when she testified for Billy Milligan, in his favor.)

This book is not what I was thinking it would be at all. This story wasn't familiar to me before hearing about the book from someone. What I envisioned it being was a story all about the difficulties of having DID, but it wasn't at that pace at all. It really went in depth with detail. You get such a good feel for the characters and how their minds work at different points in the book; such as when Shirley/Sybil's psychiatrist is so involved. I feel as though this may be a dramatized version of the nonfiction case. There were a lot of things that didn't quite go right, it was like adding two and two and getting five. Other than that, though, I thought that this was a well-written book, I couldn't put it down! I would recommend this book to anyone in high school or older. Even if you aren't interested in psychiatry or medicine, it's still a great read and you're always wondering what will happen next.

I must say I was extremely disappointed in this book. Nathan builds up a case against Wilbur, Mason and Schreiber by committing very similar faux pas that she accuses the trio of doing. She weaves a case around loose logic. It is certainly not uncommon for her to use terms such as "maybe", "quite possibly", "probably", and other such terms. While such an accusation, I would expect cold hard fact instead of a blatant guessing game on the part of the author. For example, Nathan said that Mason "probably" read a lone article in a magazine that she subscribed to for a total of five years that contained an article on MPD. She insinuated that because on a single article, Mason would have known how to fake the disorder. Quite a long stretch there, Mrs. Nathan. Many such logical liberties were taken over the course of the book. By the last page, the author has lost all of her credibility with the reader. I also must take issue with the writing style Nathan uses. "Sybil Exposed" reads like a Danielle Steele instead of a case fact nonfiction piece. I understand a non-fiction novel, but this completely misses the mark and lands right in the middle of ridiculous. From all recent accounts, the original "Sybil" was a complete farce on a grand scale but, at the very least, made a decent attempt at being grammatically correct. This is more than I can say for "Sybil Exposed". Ridden with sentence fragments and simple sentences (while not incorrect; just juvenile) became so distracting that I started paying more attention to errors than the case Nathan was trying to build. I personally find it very hard to take the word of an author that repeatedly cannot construct a proper sentence. If you are into a good dirty gossip story instead of a cold hard facts account, this is the perfect book. If you are a reader that prefers a story that just sticks with the facts and leaves the assumptions to the reader, you will be sorely disappointed.

Debbie Nathan must have known she was treading on delicate turf when she ventured into the subject of this book. I live in Minnesota, and lived here in the '90s, when a scandal rocked the social work/psychology community: a local therapist was brought before the Medical Board because people began noticing that ALL her clients were diagnosed with MPD, which seemed an unlikely coincidence. When brought to the attention of the Board, it resulted in her losing her license to practice. I don't have access to "the truth" about Sybil, or Shirley Mason. But Nathan creates a credible portrait of professional hubris and malpractice which rings true to me. Her research is thorough, and what I particularly like about the book is that although she definitely has a point of view which informs how she tells the story, she does a good job of curtailing editorial excess. She presents the story of three women, whose lives intersected at a very interesting, disturbing period in our country's history. Whatever you ultimately think of that story, whether you agree with Nathan's point of view or have a completely different take, I think you should read this book.

October 19, 2011, Statement from Dr. Patrick Suraci I went to the Special Collections Library at John Jay College of Criminal Justice to verify statements made by Debbie Nathan in her book SYBIL EXPOSED. 1. On pages 99-100 Nathan writes: "Connie would carry her apparatus to Shirley's apartment and climb in bed with her. She would clamp the paddles to Shirley's temples, twirl the dials, and press the buttons. Connie's gadget was an old electro-convulsive machine she had retired years earlier." Nathan cites the evidence for this in her "Notes: Chapter 8, No.38.. FRS Box 37, Files 1081, Tape 124." In this document on January 26, 1955, Shirley writes about "electric shock" along with her other treatments. There is absolutely no documentation of Nathan's outrageous claim. 2. On page 232 Nathan writes: "...She (Shirley Mason) died quietly in her home, surrounded by nurses, on February 26 of that year. She was seventy-five years old. It was early evening when she died." In my book SYBIL in her own words: The Untold Story of Shirley Mason, Her Multiple Personalities and Paintings. On page 261 I write: "The penultimate time I phoned Shirley's home was on February 26, 1998, at 12:07 PM. In the background I heard her weak voice pleading to Roberta, `Tell him I'm sorry. I'm sorry.' Roberta informed me that Shirley was too sick to speak on the phone. I mumbled, `Please tell her that it's okay, it's okay. I'll call later.' ... "When I called later that day at 3:01 PM Roberta stunned me with the news than Shirley had just died." This error in Ms. Nathan's book is symbolic of her lack of knowledge about Shirley Mason and other comments she makes show her ignorance about Flora Schreiber and Dr. Corneilla Wilbur because she never knew any of them. Dr. Suraci has the telephone records of that day, February 26, 1998.

This fascinating book behind the story of "Sybil", the woman whose 16 personalities captivated the imaginations of a nation in the early 1970's, explores the world from the perview of the Freudians, neo-Freudians, early psycho-pharmachologist physicians and the three major characters in a drama that brought psychiatry into the everyday vernacular of the average reader.There is no doubt that "Sybil" was a very disturbed young woman whose long-time association with her psychoanalyst only compounded her issues. It is a story of neediness, greediness, and unbridled ambition, forged in the awakenings of feminism and in transitions within psychiatry, itself. Was "Sybil" real, or a creation of an ambitious psychoanalyst and the author she chose to write the book about her patient with multiple personalities? Or was "Sybil" a product, as are so many of us, of her time and her upbringing? Read this scintillating book to form your own conclusions. Even today, "the jury remains out" regarding multiple personality disorder. This book is highly recommended, especially for those who are old enough to remember the furor caused by "Sybil", her analyst, Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, and the writer who recounted their stories: Flora Rheta Schreibner.

VERY interesting! This book exposes at lot that the original book and movie did not. The strange unhealthy relationship the Psychologist had with Shirley after treatment is just not done. It is NOT OK for a Psch Doc to become "close friends" after treatment. Close friends who live together?? Im not even saying there was anything gay going on. But that is totally against treatment and a psychs protocol. That alone and with how involved the person who wrote the book....brings up many red flags that are completely valid. If you read Sybil, you really need to read this book to get BOTH sides to her story. Then it is up to you to decide what is truth and what was forced.

It was interesting to hear what Debbie Nathan claims is the true story behind the famous book "Sybil," but I feel like countering the claims made by Flora Schreiber, Connie Wilbur and Shirley Mason was the easy part (though not necessarily the quickest part). I was more interested in an evaluation of the original 1973 novel's effect on society, it's reflection of women during that time and why. Nathan hinted that she asked herself these questions, in her intro to "Sybil Exposed" but I never really felt this issue was analyzed. Whether or not the facts of "Sybil" are actually true is less important to me than why so many people, especially women, wanted them to be true. What does that say about society, gender roles and their limitations? With so many movies and sitcoms still using MPD as a foundation for a good plot, the fascination with this disorder, regardless of whether it truly exists, is still prevalent. Have we learned anything about ourselves since the 1970s? I would have liked Nathan to have asked these questions to a modern sociologist and perhaps, even, a psychologist.

I am a Masters level Licensed Mental Health practitioner with 30 years of experience. In my early career, I attended numerous workshops and presentations focused on MPD, DID and so-called ritual abuse complete with lovingly rendered and explicitly gory details. I sat through impassioned speeches about the unfailing accuracy of recovered memories and the incapacity of children (who often live as though their and caregivers’ fictions are fact)to tell anything but the absolute truth. I even believed it for a time. And that’s the rub. Facts don’t require belief. We don’t have a scientific, objective, factual and observable measurement for personality, singular. Let alone multiple. Let’s stop giving people more problems than they have.

I read the original book Sybil when it was first published many, many years ago, I think in the 1970's, maybe earlier. At that time, it was a revelation because multiple personality disorder was a new mental illness, or so it was presented at that time. This book exposes the author of Sybil, and the actual woman whose pseudonym was Sybil, as a fraud, which I found very disappointing. I still struggle to accept Debbie Nathan's point of view, that the real Sybil deliberately portrayed herself as a person with multiple personality disorder for financial gain. Debbie Nathan maintained she researched this issue very carefully. I don't doubt that she did, however if this was a total fraud as depicted by Ms Nathan, then it is surprising it has only just been revealed and that she is the first person to investigate this issue. This book is a good read and I could not put it down. However, I was very familiar with the original book Sybil, which added to the intrigue.

This book is damaging to the many people who have had severe childhood abuse and developed Dissociative Identity Disorder and other trauma symptoms. Trauma in childhood and adulthood leaves severe scars on many people. The catchy title implies that such scars are imaginary, the result of poor treatment, or patients who are trying to inflate their importance. Nathan is not a clinician. It shows. Those of us who are experienced and seasoned clinicians have direct experience of the suffering of traumatized individuals. DID is not a fiction. The denial of trauma is a national disgrace. I hope that the tragedy being exposed at Penn State can help to open people's eyes to the realities of abuse. The reader must understand that Sybil was written decades ago when the field had little experience with the complexity of severe childhood abuse. Mistakes have been made--is that a surprise? The scientific method is designed to examine issues and refine our understanding of what is true. The scientific literature for the diagnosis and treatment of what used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder is extensive and remarkably helpful. It is available to anyone who Googles. Check out Medline, PubMed, the PILOTS database of the National Center for PTSD , or the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation ([...]). How unfortunate that Nathan uses her many skills so destructively, and one might even say, unethically. I have no financial interest in this issue. I am a retired psychiatrist with concern that all people, traumatized or not, be given respect and a chance to tell their stories.

As a former Psychiatric research nurse, I've studied historical cases of abuse in research but am truly shocked that this went on in the 60s and 70s without anyone questioning it. The story of Sybil has been around for decades and the validity of the story went unchallenged until all of those involved were dead. Aside from the travesties done to Shirley at the hands of Dr. Wilbur, I am appalled that it has taken this long to expose the fraud and abuse and that there were even people who helped keep this hidden to protect the legacy of Dr. C. Wilbur.

This is a stunning book that exposes a spectacular hoax. I first read Sybil when I was a sophomore in college (1998) and was blown away by it. At the time, I was taking several courses in clinical and industrial/behavioral psychology and was somewhat obsessed with MPD/DID. I remember doing a lot of research on Sybil and knew there were a lot of open questions regarding her diagnosis and treatment. I am absolutely shocked at the magnitude of impropriety regarding this matter. To think that the patient, doctor and the author were in cahoots is not only disturbing, it's morally reprehensible. Kudos to the author for exposing this sham, and for bringing to light the travesty known as 'Sybil'. This is a phenomenal book and I highly recommend you read it.

I'm actually surprised at the number of dissenting reviews - as several other reviewers and commenters noted, "Sybil" herself said that she had created the multiples to get sympathy and attention. Wilbur rejected her confession because, basically, she wanted to be the doctor of the most famous - "spectacular", she called it - mental patient in the world. I read Sybil as a young child and even then was surprised (and skeptical) to hear it presented as the unvarnished truth. It always seemed a bit much. This entertainingly written, well researched book will be excellent reading for anyone who was ever fascinated by the original book. The author does a wonderful job at describing the motivations of the three women - the author, the doctor and the patient - and explaining the societal forces that surrounded them and helped create a situation where such a thing could happen.

A riveting story and a particularly fascinating look at the very destructive way women were treated personally and professionally until the very recent past. It's been clear for awhile, but this book really hammers it home, how often mental illness in women had to do with their disenfranchisement in virtually every area of their life. Not that things are so much better today, but at the very least the most egregious methods (shocking, violent, debasing, and abusive) of so-called doctors—male and female—have come to an end.

I appreciated the writer who had the guts to not except everything so called medical science has put out as fact. What a disgrace that so many educated people could be so gullible. (educated fools!)This woman is a victim of cruelty by so many in the medical field. 'Sybil's' first mistake was putting her trust in psychiatry. The whole story is bazaar. She must have bypassed many checks in her own spirit to have allowed her to go down such a ridiculous path. Thanks for all the investigative work put into this book! Doctor shopping....beware!

This book clears up so much. It explains the events and individuals in great detail. The author shows how fragile people can be, and how the psychiatric profession is extremely flawed. I read "Sybil" when I was 13. It was hard for me to imagine a person, let alone a mother, who could commit such atrocities on her own daughter. Kids came first in my family. We always knew our parents would sacrifice anything for us. "Sybil" was a horrifying account, and caused me to have more empathy for those who were less fortunate than myself. "Sybil Exposed" made we wonder how many poor souls are out there today who have been misdiagnosed, and taken advantage of by unscrupulous individuals. We should always question diagnoses. Contrary to what they think, doctors are not Gods.

Much of the information in Debbie Nathan's book has been publicly available for sometime. I was greatly looking forward to seeing it all in one place, as I heard about the book as it was written. Sadly, while all the components for a compelling narrative exist within this triad, the book does not bring that narrative to fruition. Rather, Nathan creates a circuitous route, confusing the reader as to what is past, present, future vis a vis the narrative. The latter chapters, on the False Memory Foundation, and the changing role of the DID organizations, seem added as afterthoughts, hastily written and slapped on. I was really, really looking forward to this book and am greatly dissapointed with the half-assed job ultimately produced.

For me, in an age when googling passes for research the degree to which she has painstakingly researched is truly impressive. Traveling to the places where the story took place, getting first person accounts and spending what must have been countless hours reading through dusty old records and letters. What emerges is the story of the growth of a myth that none of the 3 people ("Sybil, the psychologist or the author of the book Sybil) could have planned. This myth they created became a craze, and for some even a religion. The book allows you to be sympathetic to well meaning people while being horrified by what happened. The best book I have read this year!

As someone who actually works with people that have MPD I was interested to read the book..the contents are horrific in the sense that the most powerful of people who work with people with emotional issues can inflict the kind of treatment on the most vulnerable of our society. MPD is not something to fear, some of our most influential , talented and productive people have this 'inside family;, they are lawyers, doctors, and other highly educated people with great artistic talents...I would suggest people read this book if only to show how vulnerable the emotionally ill people are and to find the right help from the most qualified people. If if doesn't feel right, then find someone else.

An interesting book although it is a slow read as it is very medically based. You spend a lot of time reading the index just to understand what exactly they are talking about. I thought when I bought the book that it would be more of an expose on how they all pulled off one of the biggest literary lies of that time, enough so that even Hollywood fell for it. This is not the case. It is more about how this so called psychotherapist used and abused her power over her patient and how the writer of the book "Sybil" only cared about the money to be made from this patient by making up much of the horrors inflicted upon the patient by her parents.

I watched the movie Sybil in AP psychology in high school and again in college psychology courses and was intrigued by the story, which was a driving factor of why I read Sybil Exposed in the first place. It is pretty dry and slow moving in parts, but also interesting to get the back story of all those involved. My biggest issue with the book is the fact that on Kindle, only 65% of it is actually book. The other 35% is acknowledgments and footnotes. I was so disappointed to find out that there was very little book at all. Overall, it was just okay. Buyer beware: there is very little actual reading!

Debbie Nathan's Sybil Exposed is a highly readable investigative masterpiece. Nathan documents how Sybil, the best-selling book about a supposed multiple personality was essentially a work of fiction portrayed as fact. To her credit, Nathan does this without portraying the patient, psychiatrist and writer involved in this fabrication as venal frauds. Rather, she shows how they came to delude themselves before they deluded the world. Sadly, the world was far too willing to be deceived. Nathan shows how Multiple Personality Disorder became a psychological fad that led to many damaged lives. We've been through several other psychological fads since then. Sybil Exposed instructs us to be more skeptical and cautious in the future.

Debbie Nathan takes an in-depth look at the case of Sybil, a psychiatric case that sparked the multiple personality phenomenon. I thought this was a fascinating book. I know that many have criticized it because it was written after the death of the three main women, however I found it to be well written, engaging, and well researched. Overall, well worth reading.

At first, I was very turned off by this book, because it seemed like the author was condemning the entire history of psychiatry, especially hysteria diagnoses, by today's standards - of course these beliefs seem insane - people used to believe the world was flat also (which, granted, probably didn't harm anyone). But, as the meat of the book was addressed, the author won me over with her chronology of events in the life of Shirley Mason, the real woman behind the famous "

Just kidding. There is only me. I am glad this book was written. I too swallowed the Sybil story when it first came out. Then again, I believed A Million Little Pieces was true as well. In a world where lives have been ruined by accusations of ritual sexual abuse of workers at a daycare center based on false memories, we need somebody keeping the mental health profession honest.

This is a compelling book about a fascinating subject, painstakingly researched and extremely well-written. I couldn't put it down. I also believe it is an important book, clearing up many widely-held and popular misconceptions. I notice that there are some vindictive contributors to this forum, willing to say anything to discredit the book and its author. I believe they are motivated by either personal or professional agendas and I will not engage in debate with them. Whatever nasty comments they might post to my expressed opinion here will not shake my gratitude to Ms. Nathan for having given us this book.

As someone with an interest in knowing more about Sybil, I hoped this book would shed a little more light on that famous case. Instead, the first half essentially rehashed information from the book by Flora Schreiber and the second half launched into a political agenda against the diagnosis of multiple personality disorder. Her criticisms of Cornelia Wilbur include speculation on whether she really loved her husband and a criticism that she extended credit to her patient (as opposed to the moral high ground of not seeing based on her inability to pay?). This author, who in other places has been described as a feminist author, describes Flora Schreiber's appearance and dress in disparaging detail. Sybil's doctor was a pioneer in treating multiple personality disorder, and naturally there have been many advances in treatment since then, but the harsh criticism that there were some missteps in the early stages of treatment seems akin to pointing out that early treatments for leukemia were not as successful as those available today. That is, it is true, but today's improved treatments result from the work of those brave enough to work with these disorders before there were established protocols for them. If I had it to do over again, I would just save my money on this book.

I found this book to be quite contradictory...I thought it was going to be more focused on Sybil's life & what happened....like the movie...however it was more focused on whether or not Sybil was actually suffering from DID or not. I've studied Psychology for 9 years and actually suffer from a few mental health disorders as well...guess that's why I found Sybil's story to be so impressive & rare. I recently found out I may also be suffering from Dissociative Personality Disorder....

I came upon an old review in an old magazine and ordered this book, as I'd read Sybil and had bought what now seems to be the Myth of the Multiple Personality. I am not qualified to say if Ms Nathan's work is the final answer on the subject, but she has done the research and produced a convincing argument that the story of Sybil was more media-fairy tale than truth. In the process, she also reveals the truly bizarre inter-workings of the whole diagnosis manual process and demonstrates how very easy it is for false-memoir to make it to market. Unsettling and insightful.

I was relieved that the grotesque abuse described in the original book never happened. Then, I was angry with "Sybil's" real "bad mother," Dr. Wilbur, for the combination of ignorance, opportunism, and projection which kept "Sybil" physically and mentally ill nearly all of her adult life. (I felt sympathy for Flora Rheta Schrieber, the author of the original book, because she was just an ambitious writer trying to make a living.) "Sybil Exposed" is a cautionary tale about why the road to true women's liberation doesn't go through the tangled forest of victimhood. Thank you, Debbie Nathan.

I remember when Sybil was first released. The movie on TV with Sally Field was excellent. I did believe multiple personalities existed. This book is fascinating. How sad that the story of the real Sybil is so different. Congratulations to the author for letting us know the facts. Thelma A. Norton

I had always wondered about "Sybil". The story at the time the original book was written seemed to create a lot of victims. Perhaps it was mass hysteria. The book "Sybil Exposed" put the true light on the subject. I'm surprised at the Psychologist's behavior however. She stepped outside the bounds for professionals. Sybil was totally dependent on the psychologist for her very existence. That was a sadness because she had skills and abilities. With proper guidence she may have been...

Having seen the movie (with Sally Field), and read the book when it came out, I was surprised to discover this new work. There is SO MUCH that the public doesn't know about this case, about the doctor and the author involved, and how this "Corporation of Mental Illness" was created. The author has a very readable style. I couldn't put it down, and plowed through it in two days. This is a fascinating book, and for anyone interested in mental illness, I would highly recommend it!

Regardless of one's position on MPD/DID, this book chronicles a crucially important cultural moment that had a tremendous impact on the field of psychiatry and on the public consciousness. Debbie Nathan has written a meticulously researched, eminently readable account of a story that was somehow overlooked for a long time. She was fair to every subject in her book as a good journalist and critical researcher should be. To those who don't like what it recounts, I say, [see review title].

I commend Debbie Nathan for the obviously extensive research that went into this book, but there is too much speculation and not enough hard evidence for some of her claims. She uses words like "probably"and "could have" a little too much for my taste. She also seems to write with an agenda, clearly showing bias to reach her conclusions, which I won't reveal to avoid playing spoiler. Overall, it's an entertaining read, but this exposé needs more facts and less opinion and speculation.

I have long been fascinated by the Sybil story. This book clearly goes over the history and personality to show the reader how MPD came about. The only problem is the long winded histories of the people involved became hard to follow.

The author makes a number of valid points about this case and the analysis of Sybil. However she has her own bias against the Dissociative Identity disorder and it shows. Her concerns and conclusions about the Sybil case should not be generalized to the disorder as a whole.

Rather startled by this book. Well researched. No opinion unsubstantiated. I read Sybil when it was first all the rage. Totally believed it all. Questions only now forthcoming.

I too like those described by Debbie Nathan, got caught up in the MPD phoenomenon that exploded in the 90's as a teenager. I read every book I could find, Sybil being the Holy Grail of books on the subject. The book was very detailed and I almost feel compelled to go read Sybil again as a refresher. It was still a fairly easy read and kept you going till the end.

This book made me stop and ask, why would a therapist put suggestions in an unbalanced patients mind knowing it would hurt her mentally and then share the sessions with a writer that thinks she's writing about true accounts of this patient? So sad.

As a former psychology major, I had always been interested in this case. When I saw the description of the book, it was quite a surprise. It is good to know that research continues, and that such scams do not continue.

This was one of the best books I've read in a while. I've watched both movies, the second movie was more like the book. And I've read Sybil numerous times. I thought something was very strange about it. I mean who would do such horrible things to a child and the people living with them not hear the child's screams and see the bruises.Bravo to the author.

This book and the movies always had me interested but this book tells the tale as we have never seen it before! It tells how a Dr seems to have fallen in love with the idea of being famous, how she got to close to her patient and wound up in a tailspin with no end except to just write the book!

I read Sybil a dozen times and I'm flabbergasted by what this book reveals. So many lives ruined by a power hungry woman. A must read if you followed the book or the movie.

It gets a bit scary. Yes, I am thanking for the author's careful study of the case of "Sybil," and her pointing out of tremendous problems in the therapy involved, and the probability that particular case was iatrogenic. However, she goes too far in discrediting DID as a legitimate diagnosis. Methinks thou doest protest too much.

Many have said that "Sybil Exposed" is well-documented. The book certainly appears to be well-documented, based on the lengthy Notes section (pp. 247-282). Others, like me, read this book and wonder about its accuracy. How does Nathan know why Shirley Mason, or Cornelia Wilbur or Flora Schreiber said or did certain things, or how they felt at certain times? I came across a footnote referring to a 1991 "People Magazine" cover story about Roseanne Barr. I decided to track down the article for fact-checking purposes. Was what Nathan said in her book (p. 222) actually mentioned in the magazine article? In this case, it wasn't. Others have found similar errors, suggesting that the publisher may not have fact-checked the book, the author may be careless, or the author has an agenda and may have misrepresented facts to support her agenda. Whatever the case, after nearly 40 years, "Sybil" continues to interest us.

Long overdue and very important follow-up investigation to the Sybil story that we all bought hook, line, and sinker in the 80s. Very informative.

According to the product description of SYBIL EXPOSED, "Nathan gives proof that the allegedly true story was largely fabricated." Although Nathan did a good job of constructing a narrative of how and why she believes the book SYBIL came to be, neither the patient (Shirley Mason aka Sybil, the psychiatrist (Wilbur), nor the author (Schriebner) are alive to defend against Nathan's interpretations of their interactions and their motivations to produce the book. On p. 396 (Kindle), Nathan states that Wilbur "used her medical credentials to aggressively promote a diagnosis [multiple personality disorder] that, ultimately, hurt women far more than it helped them . . ." As a journalist Nathan has a right to use her research findings to impugn the motives of Dr. Wilbur; however, she offered no research to support her contention that the diagnosis "hurt women far more than it helped them." Wanda Karriker, Ph.D. Author, Morning, Come Quickly

Very interesting book, the beginning is hard to get through.. very factual (resembling three chapters or so worth of a Wikipedia page) but necessary to understand the individuals discussed in the book.

I could only get through the first couple chapters as it was way too much detail of the background of the three women involved in the story. I hope to be able to pick it back up again and finish, but I am not holding my breath.

This is a hatchet job done on three deceased women who cannot respond or sue for slander. Nathan claims that MPD/DID was made up by Dr. Wilbur. I KNOW this isn't true because as a young psychologist I treated a patient with classic MPD, with the history of abuse, in the late 1960s. The book, Sybil, didn't come out until the early 1970s. Neither the patient or I could not have been influenced by the book, which didn't exist. Also DID is an established diagnosis; it is in DSM-V. It has not been discarded by science, as Nathan claims.

Very interesting and well written story behind the story.

I read "Sybil" in high school and totally swallowed the premise. This book exposes the story as the manufactured sham it turns out to be. But it's still a fascinating story because it reveals the personalities and foibles of the real people.

When I was in college studying counseling we had to read the book about Sybil. We were told it was true. All these years later it is interesting to found out that it was largely not true. A very exciting book.

I found this a well-researched argument about the veracity of the famous case of 'Sybil'. It was dry reading at times but this type of book usually is. It's an interesting read.

For my own. Info.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It is a well researched and well written book that reveals the incredible truth behind the Sybil story. Compelling reading (regardless of whether or not you ever read the original book or saw the movie).

interesting but too much detail - goes on and on!

Great read! Very insightful, total page turner!

Read the book Sybil and watched the movie and liked it, was haunting but interesting so when I saw this book regarding what I had seen/read I was interested. Started reading it and didn't like it from the start, too clinical and not much of a story, didn't even finish reading it.

I was very interested in the story behind the Sybil case. It was very dry. I only read half of the book and stopped.

This book was well researched, well written, very insightful! It helped me see ethics and laws around counseling and medicine seem important.

Its fair, but then again its also used, so it's OK. I knew it was not new when I bought it.

You do a great job!! ! I am a satisfied customer.

It's just too bad that "Sybil" was all a hoax. This is a sample but I did buy the book.

Sybil was so shocking and so eye opening, and now we find as is so common, so much of this infamous story was suggested and guided into existence by the doctors.

Very revealing about a story that most people have taken at face value. Amazing how the scientific community - combined with the media can manipulate the general population.

bought this for my sister as a gift...she read it in one day.. she really liked it and found a lot of the facts to very true.

I am a licensed therapist in Virginia and lived through the nineties as a professional in private practice. I felt at a gut level and beyond, that the mass hysteria about MPD and Satanic Cults were exactly that/hysteria. I couldn't say that out loud to anyone because to admit you weren't a true believer was tantamount to professional suicide at that time. I am so thrilled that this research was undertaken and this book was published. I feel personally vindicated. I am also concerned in 2022 as I am seeing signs of the diagnosis "re-emerging". I think that so many therapists (and others) find it so fascinating that they get "caught up" in the riviting details of this "diagnosis". I could go on and on. But I won't. This book is a MUST READ for anyone in the MH field particularly if you work with survivors of trauma. Yes, dissociation is a real phenomena and affect people in lots of distrubing ways. However, widespread diagnosis of an actual Dissociative Identity Disorder is in my opinion irresponsible and disempowering to the many women who have been (and will be) victimized a Medical Community intent on creating a more exciting career

Even my son read this story!! It is hard for me to pick up a book and stay interested but this book kept my attention the whole time!

I have always been interested in the story of Sybil's multiple personalities. This book makes you question if she really did have them.

Tragic for so many people. How can people who purpose to help people get so off track. Even worse is how other professionals were so duped.

Probably would be moderately interesting to anyone familiar with the original "Sybil", but it is a fascinating read for anyone in the mental health field

Exceptional book. Highly recommended for any one who wants to know what really happened in the 1960's and 1970's. Buy it!

I read it from cover to cover in 3 days. This is a must have in every psych fanatic's bookshelf

What a great book. Gives insight to how one doctor's reach for fame can go wrong. Personally I loved the book.

Important book about one of the worst malpractices in (even current) psychiatry

This was a really interesting book. I really enjoyed reading it.

Disappointed Sybil was fake

Well researched. Good book for your home library.

Debbie Nathan over and over proves one thing about the Sybil story in this book - that she believes she is an omniscient being when it comes to the three women involved. She understands their deceptions, their deepest fears and wishes, their rationales for behavior, their disguised motivations, their secret obsessions, their moral convictions, and ultimately their shared folie à trois. And most of all, she knows The Truth. The Truth that Shirley Mason was a poor woman who was tricked, tricked by her psychiatrist, by the sensational journalist that compromised all of her morals for money and fame, and by herself. What the author doesn't prove is why we should take anything about this book at face value, when the majority of it is cherry picked data (how could it NOT be?) heavily influenced by the author's fallible human perceptions and confirmation bias (because not one of us is exempt from these things, especially when we extrapolate from hard evidence based on what we are hoping to find). Why we should take it seriously when her hypocrisy of doing exactly what she accuses the author of Sybil to have done - namely of writing a sensational book for money and fame about something she doesn't really understand for her own selfish reasons and spoiling the reputation of many people unable to defend themselves from her scathing accusations and "observations" of people she never observed or spoke one word to - is so blatant. No, what she doesn't prove is whether the Sybil story is mostly true or mostly false. What she doesn't prove is the exact premise of the book. About the last part of the book titled "Contagion" - where she attempts to draw straight lines from the Sybil story to the Michelle Remembers story to the Day Care/SRA "moral panic" to the book "The Courage To Heal" to the Dissociative Identity Disorder diagnosis being legitimized to tens of thousands of women being hurt and basically losing their families and sanity to the "iatrogenic" and/or "extremely over-diagnosed" syndrome. It is wishful thinking - and the obvious real ultimate goal of the book: to discredit these women (and men!) and their extremely dedicated doctors and supportive loved ones in the name of an agenda that False Memories are the real epidemic and not child abuse - that the real perpetrators are the victims and that the victims are the perpetrators. Abuse survivors are used to hearing this - victim blaming - it is not different from the woman who gets raped being told she shouldn't have dressed like a slut or the child told he is being beaten for his own good. They will survive this book in the name of truth and human dignity and human suffering. What shouldn't survive is Debbie Nathan's reputation as a truthful or compelling journalist, of someone who should be listened to with the good faith we give people who have not proven to have a huge personal agenda they cannot or will not see past. If you, reader, decide to purchase this book I implore you to do so on the basis of Debbie Nathan being an interesting (if sad) human specimen exposing her disordered thought processes to the world and not on the hope that you will have a better understanding of the Sybil story - because you won't.

Interesting if true

thank you

Author Debbie Nathan contends that the 1973 story of 'Sybil' (Shirley Mason) and her 16 personalities was largely fabricated by the patient, her psychiatrist (Dr. Cornelia Wilbur), and an imaginative journalist (Flora Schreiber). Wilbur's treatments subjected Shirley to 'years of anti-psychotics, psychedelics, uppers and downers, hypnosis,and Pentothal injections now recognized to provoke fantasies,' as well as electroshock therapy. Further, the relationship between Wilbur and Mason was colored by transference and countertransference (they lived and traveled together for years, Dr. Wilbur hired Mason to take care of her father-in-law and also forgave $30,000+ in therapy bills in return for being allowed to publish 'Sybil'), and assignments given Mason to read stories about evil mothers (allegedly the origin of Mason's personalities). These 'treatments' are now believed to have produced false-memory narratives at the core of the story; regardless, the story was marketed as a partnership involving all three of the women, and is believed to have caused an upsurge in the diagnoses of both dissociative identify disorders and a wave of investigations of reported sexual crimes against small children (30 were charged, no supporting evidence found). Subsequent analysis of recorded conversations between Schreiber and Wilbur by Dr. Herbert Spiegel (a leader in hypnosis treatment who personally interviewed Mason several times) and academic Robert Rieber led both to conclude that Wilbur suggested multiple personalities to her client, whom they believed was simply 'hysteric.' Some of the stories were ridiculous - eg. a flight to Amsterdam to aid a refugee fleeing from the Nazis. Sigmund Freud had also rejected grown suspicious of using hypnosis, believing it made it too easy for doctors to 'encourage' patients to 'remember' events that never happened. A childhood memory of rape turned out to be recollection of a tonsillectomy instead. Also interesting - Mason improved considerably when separated from Dr. Wilbur for about nine years, earning a master's degree, living as an art teacher at a community college and owning her own house. Further, Flora Schreiber discovered major discrepancies between what Shirley had written in her diaries at the time the early abuses that supposedly caused her mental traumas occured, entries supposedly made in 1941 were made in ballpoint (not used in the U.S. until 1945),and nobody in Shirley's home town had any such recollections. Publication of 'Sybil,' however, brought Shirley back to Dr. Wilbur, recurrence of her symptoms, spending most of her time in bed, and drug addiction. Dr. Wilbur, however, realized their relationship had to end when she moved away from Mason, told Shirley, and the dissociative episodes ended. Dr. Wilbur ended up teaching psychiatry at Lexingon, KY., while also taking eight residents as her patients, and generating a mini-upswing in multiple-personality diagnoses in the area. Author Nathan also cites a 1958 letter by Mason kept in the John Jay College of Criminal Justice confessing to making up the numerous personalities for attention and excitement; Dr. Wilbur's response was that this showed progress in Mason's therapy. Readers should also be aware there is considerable controversy over whether psychotherapy, in general, is successful or not. Per Wikipedia, the American Psychological Association now recommends that Shirley Mason's case no longer be cited as a 'classic example' of multiple personality disorder. Nathan believes that the real root cause of Shirley Mason's maladies was pernicious anemia - produces mood swings, hallucinations, withdrawal, and identity confusion; Shirley was hospitalized for this after leaving Dr. Wilbur's care, and had been successfully treated for this as well as a child - temporarily, until the injections were discontinued. Bottom-Line: Emotional dependence (Shirley Mason), professional ambition (Connie Wilbur), and financial incentives (Flora Schreiber) were the real causes of 'Sybil's' decades-long multiple personalities. Hospitals have since closed their inpatient multiple personality disorder units, but the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociative Identity Disorder continues to give a Cornelia Wilbur Award for outstanding clinical contributions to the treatment of dissociative disorders (WSJ, 10/29/2011 - Carol Tavris).

I'm kind of disgusted by the reviews of this book that declare MPD is real and Debbie Nathan has no education and no Psyciatric degree to give her the knowledge and right to question the "Sybil" case. Knowledge comes from all sorts of places, and when combined with a healthy dose of skepticism and diligence, gosh, I know it's shocking, but people WITHOUT a psychiatric degree can write intelligently and correctly about psychiatric topics. I've been seeing psychiatrists for 25 years and I have news for folks-- they're far from infallible. In fact a significant portion of them aren't fit to be counseling or medicating anyone. That degree doesn't amount to much when the person behind it is not intellectually honest, or they're driven by their own agendas, prejudices and biases. On the other hand an honest and intelligent investigator with an interest in psychology can actually well surpass the comprehension of some of the psychiatrists I've been forced to deal with by crummy insurance. In addition, this proclamation that only a psychiatrist or degree'd professional is fit to write about a topic or critically examine it is obtuse. So you're saying anyone who writes about a subject needs to have a degree in it, all official on the wall? Do you realize how much that would set back journalism? A good journalist approaches a subject critically and intelligently, thoroughly researches, and forms an opinion. If we only had experts in MPD writing about MPD, we'd never advance in our understanding of the condition, in as much as it exists, and how it needs to be treated. The mind is of interest to us all. It is relevant to us all. We can all learn about it and we SHOULD all be questioning the rapidly changing and developing techniques for treating the mind as well as understanding it. Finally, I'm stunned to see people still so ignorant about false memories, how they're formed, and the extreme suggestibility of the mind. I'm shocked to see people even slightly supporting WIlbur's methods, which, by the way, are completely outside the bounds of modern psychiatry in every way, and were even in question at the time. Her behavior and activities outside of the Sybil case confirm she had no ethics, and no ability to critically approach the functioning of the brain. People like her destroyed MANY hundreds of lives, and she clearly destroyed the life of Shirley Mason. MPD may in fact exist. I am not convinced either way. But her methods of approaching an MPD case, if this was in fact one, were despicable. Supporters of the original Sybil case as described by Wilbur need to do a lot more research into the hundreds of cases of false memory, scientifically proven, and the ease with which memories are implanted. Critical thinking, people. Try it.

Many others wrote plenty about the ludicrous assumptions and conclusions that Nathan draws in this book. I won't bother to go through all of them; as they are so repetitively obvious. No name a few: The author claims that it is reasonable to use ONE case (granted, of possibly less than stellar therapy--though true to the times, in many ways); as supposed proof or disproof of a whole diagnostic criteria is bad enough. Along the same flawed logic, saying that if someone faked schyzophernia then the whole diagnosis is by definition nullified? The author claims that ONE occasion of a patient saying that they don't really think that they have the problem they were diagnoses with; constitutes PROOF of not only that patient indeed not having the diagnosis, but the whole notion of the diagnosis being nill. Along the same line, an alcoholic claiming that he doesn't 'really drink' or 'doesn't really have an addiction' would not only mean that they are not alcoholics, but also that NO ONE is and that alcoholism doesn't exist. The author never met the patient. Yet she seems to claim that she knows BETTER what sybil knew or felt or thought; than the people who KNEW her and spoke to her and interviewed her directly. Nathan's telepathic abilities are a marvel; but they do not constiture scientific proof. Then again, Nathan is not a scientist. Yet she claims to debunk scientific findings about trauma, traumatic reactions, traumatic amnesia, and dissociation (which is, incidentially, part of the accepted presentation of PTSD). She is not a mental health professional; either. But she claims to know better what should and should've have been done with Sybil AND what is being done behind the closed doors of supposedly all therapists who treat severely and chronically traumatized individuals--as well as the supposed motivations of these multitudes of therapists. As said prior--her telepathic (imagined?) abilities are a marvel; but they do not constitute fact. If you want to read a fictional account of an interpretation of a story about a stroy--go ahead. Non-fiction this is not. Sadly, Nathan only exposes what seems like a combination of bad journalizm and an agenda to spin details to support her pre-supposition. For actual scientific findings for the REALITY of dissociation, and the validity of dissociative identity disorder--as measured scientifically, bio-physically, psychobiologically, and all that other good stuff--I recommend a REAL scientific paper (this an open access article, so anyone can read it): It is titled: Fact or Factitious? A Psychobiological Study of Authentic and Simulated Dissociative Identity States [...] In it, the supposition that fantasy and suggestion underly Dissociative Identity Disorder is quite thoroughly statistically debunked. Instead, it actually shows that people with DID behave more like people who are very low on suggestion and fantasy scores. And that trying to mimic and simulate DID does not look--biologically, psychoneurologically, SCIENTIFICALLY--at all like real DID. It also demonstrates a very clear distinction of DID as NOT being scocially based or suggested. If you really want to learn about the validity of DID (and the reality of what happens to children's brains when they are chronically overwhelmed)--check out the REAL facts.

I picked up this book because I've always been interested in MPD/DID and I remember reading the book and watching the movie years ago and wondering at the time...what gives? Is this true or not? Over the years, I've read many many books regarding MPD/DID and now I can add this one to the list. Overall, its a good book, but it has some flaws. I didn't really like how the author pretended to use the pov of the people involved sometimes because it was mostly supposition. We can't really know what Shirley Mason (Sybil) or Dr Wilbur really thought, save for things that they've written down. Even so, I do understand that writing the book this way made it an easier read and less dry because, as a result, it reads more like fiction than the non-fiction account that really it is and so more palatable to the average reader. I would have given another star if the author had included many more excerpts from Ms Mason's therapy, perhaps with commentary attached to it by a variety of mental health professionals. IMO, reading about how she (and the original author of the book, "Sybil") researched Ms Mason's story by going back and interviewing people who knew her back in the day was the most interesting part. In the process, its shown that, clearly, some of Ms Mason's "memories" were true and some were not, both ones that appeared in the original book and that did not. It also seems obvious that she suffered from many health issues and not just mental ones and it leaves you feeling very sad for the trials and pain she went through in her life. Dr Wilbur, on the other hand, I had very little sympathy for. Yes, of course, it was years ago and therapists did things then that are not acceptable today...but she loaded her patient up with way too many drugs, did ECT on her, and (worst of all) bound the two of them deeply together financially and socially. Completely unacceptable. Therapists who read this book should take it as a warning about What Not To Do. These dangerous practices were not only were bad for the patient in question, but cast doubts on the quality of the "memories" recovered in the process, especially since some of them were clearly historically and factually inaccurate. Two obvious cases involved the "memory" of one of Ms Mason's alters being flown to Amsterdam from the Twin Cities in the middle of World War II to take part in some secret mission(impossible!) and her "memory" of seeing a boy die when there was no way that she could have been there and must have, instead, heard about this death and come to believe that she had witnessed it and so had another personality come into being as a result. All it took was a little research to find out that they did not have transatlantic flights during the 1940's. Pan Am only had transatlantic flights for a few weeks in the late 1930's and they were discontinued once Poland was invaded. And it was VERY expensive, so that only the ultra rich could afford it. So, Ms Mason could not have taken a commerical flight from the Twin Cities to Amsterdam in the 1940's and no US or British military plane would have flown into Nazi occupied Amsterdam. This is sheer fantasy. And, sadly, it calls into question the process by which these "memories" were extracted and the professionalism of the therapist who would not only believe these memories, but refuse to look at her own methods. We may never know if Ms Mason really had MPD/DID or if she had some other mental issue or a combination thereof. The waters are simply too muddied. Its definitely true that the release of the book and movie, "Sybil" had a profound and long-lasting effect on the psychiatric community and on popular opinion in regards to MPD/DID. What this work proves is that Ms Mason's case is not as clear-cut as the book and movie would have had us believe, that there is way more to the story than what was presented at the time, and that we may now never know what really happened in that small town to this young girl all those years ago as so much time has gone by and so many witnesses are gone now. What is certain is that, sadly, Ms Mason was raised in an uber restrictive environment due to her parent's religion, while at the same time being high strung and very creative, and also had to deal with a mother who looked to be depressed off and on and this could easily have been the basis for many of her problems. In truth, her assortment of physical and mental illnesses would have been called "hysteria" prior to the advent of modern psychotherapy. One wonders what Freud would have made of her?

Overall Sybil Exposed succeeds admirably. "Sybil", in Debbie Nathan's research, includes not just Shirley Mason (aka Sybil), but the principal board members of Sybil, Inc. (Shirley's term). They consisted of: Shirley Mason -- patient, Dr. Connie Wilbur, -- psychiatrist, and Flora Schreiber -- journalist and author of the popular book on Sybil. Nathan appears to have done a remarkably careful job of documenting the complex relationship that each woman had with the other over the long timeframe during which the story of Sybil and her multiple personalities occupied the center of their lives. Ms. Nathan provides vivid accounts, based largely on Dr. Wilbur's notes, of how Sybil came to be diagnosed with multiple personality disorder (MPD), and how MPD captured the attention of the psychiatric profession itself. Especially compelling, if not chilling, is Nathan's account of Dr. Wilbur's effort to drug and question Sybil until she got the results sought: specifically, an explanation of Sybil's MPD that pointed to Sybil's sexually abusive mother as the ultimate cause. All the while, Nathan manages not to lose sight of the development of psychiatry as a field, and especially its growing reliance on barbiturates in the late 1930s. The central point of the Sybil case is that the diagnosis was a fraud. During the so-called treatment sessions, Dr. Wilbur would recklessly inject Sybil with a variety of stupor-inducing drugs and then persistently ask leading questions of Sybil and her various personalities until Sybil admitted to being sexually abused by her mother as a child. That abuse, Wilbur posited, caused the proliferation of personalities in Sybil. Never mind that, over time, Wilbur could find no external evidence to substantiate Sybil's allegations or that, at one point during her therapy, Sybil herself actually confessed to fabricating the personalities. Neither recantation, nor the absence of evidence could deter Dr. Wilbur's conviction in the MPD diagnosis and the pivotal role played by Sybil's mother, Mattie Mason. And, if her partner in crime, Flora Schreiber, had initial doubts as a journalist, those doubts were ultimately swept away with the prospect of a bestseller. Ms. Nathan is careful and lucid in all but two parts of Sybil Exposed: the opening and very closing pages. Here Nathan claims that Sybil's fans, and especially her female fans could relate to Sybil because of the "frustrations" endured by ambitious women before the dawn of the feminist age" (xix), and because Sybil's many fans "felt so damaged by the cruelties of traditional family life that they could not trust their own mothers, much less their memories (p 236)." Sybil, Nathan contends, became "a language of our conflict, an idiom of distress." It's hard to find any support for those contentions in Sybil Exposed. To claim that Sybil had broad appeal for the reasons Nathan proffers is pure speculation in an otherwise prudent text. Finally, Nathan's end-of-the-book, last minute attempt to rescue Dr. Wilbur by concluding that "All of her professional life she had made extraordinary efforts to assist women in healing and fulfilling their dreams" (236) is to substitute sentimental cant for good sense. With Sybil, Wilbur violated the fundamental physician's oath to do no harm. For women interested in the serious pursuit of science she provided an example that stands as a roadblock to be surmounted rather than a life to be emulated.

I really enjoyed this book. Nathan's conclusions about the Sybil case aren't mere conjecture; she did research and went through Flora Rheta Schreiber's archive at John Jay University, and she has the documentation to back up her claims. I didn't feel there was a lot of effort to attribute motivations or thoughts to people she didn't interview. For the most part, the entire book relies on documents from the Schreiber archive and the author's own investigation to "expose" the truth - that it is highly probable that Shirley Mason, the real "Sybil," did not have MPD and had never been horrifically abused. To me, the recantation Mason wrote saying she had fabricated the whole thing was not as compelling a piece of evidence as the fact that people who knew and saw Mason every day of her childhood - including a household worker - had no recollection and never saw evidence of any abuse. And if you've read "Sybil," you know that much of the claimed abuse and outrageous actions by "Sybil's" mother would have been visible or knowable by people who were close to the family - especially in the kind of small town Shirley grew up in. The book does get pretty critical, in the last part, of therapist-encouraged "recovered memories." But I think skepticism is warranted. Nathan points out that not one of the cases of ritualistic Satanic abuse in the 1980s and 1990s that the media covered breathlessly - and where people ended up in prison - was ever conclusively proved with scientific evidence, or any evidence at all other than the (probably false) "recovered" memories of the people involved. In most cases, not one shred of evidence of daycare/preschool "abuse rings" or Satanic groups was ever found. That is something to consider and something to be concerned about. I thought, honestly, that therapists had stopped a lot of the irresponsible "memory recovery" therapies that resulted in false accusations and was surprised to read that apparently, some therapists are still using those debunked methods with their patients. I never saw Nathan, in the book, claim that MPD didn't exist or that all recovered memories are false. Just that most likely, the methods that therapists used in past years resulted in fabricated memories; and that MPD was most likely wildly overdiagnosed in the wake of "Sybil." She does draw a direct connection between the Sybil case, and resulting negative consequences like "recovered memories" being used to send people to prison for hundreds of years, that I thought was both clear, and not overblown. I thought this was a great read. It's dense in places - there's a lot of research involved - but Nathan was meticulous in her investigations and it shows. A few small inconsistencies - similar to those that are found in just about any work of this magnitude, where the author is relying on archived papers for her sources, shouldn't be taken as larger than they really are. A couple of minor mistakes does not mean that the book as a whole is untrue and the author is untrustworthy; that is a classic logical fallacy. One usually employed when people are hearing something they don't want to hear.

Hmm. How to review this book. First, I am an informed reviewer in that I have a doctorate and have worked for many years in the mental health field, both in academe and clinically. Second, as any good scientist, I will put my biases out there. I think that MPD is a bunch of hooey that has never been shown empirically to be anything other than behavior. I read this book because I have published in the scholarly literature on the hooey and hysteria and extremism that has taken place around this very slippery construct that some people believe exists. However, this is not about belief. It is about science and the fact is that although dissociation is a well established phenomenon, MPD (DID) is not and has never been. Although, the true believers, like the vaccines cause autism bunch, will continue to insist that the construct exists and cite all sorts of anecdotal evidence to support their claim.I'm sure that the true believers will jump all over this review, the way that they jumped all over Acocella's book. But they really do not have a good position on which to stand. They generally ignore what is pointed out by way of anything but their own position, and they continue to point to research done by the MPD adherents, which is flawed and has been vetted through people who believe as they do. The brain scan stuff has been thoroughly debunked, and no one can say that MPD is anything other than a set of behaviors, whether iatrogenically induced or not. It is not even considered a diagnosis in some countries So to preface, I refuse to argue the existence of the DID/MPD phenomenon because most people will not argue the case from the standpoint of the research. Anecdotes are not research. Moreover this review is about the book, not about the diagnosis. Why did I read this book? Because I wanted to read about the context of and the history of the time that this fraud was perpetuated. In that regard, the author did a very nice job, although I thought that she should have also cited and referenced: Acocella, Joan (1999). Creating Hysteria: Women and Multiple Personality Disorder. Jossey-Bass. This was an excellent overview of the MPD, and in some ways a better book. Acocella was far more meticulous in her documentation than Mason's, although Acocella took the same hits that Mason is getting from the true believer crowd. This book was an exposee. It was not scientific research and therefore should not be held to the same standards as a scholarly research study. That it was subjective (all research is to one degree or another, especially qualitative research) is not really germane. Nathan was out to tell the story of what a monstrous psychiatrist did to a woman who may have had a physiological condition that went untreated. To say that Connie Wilbur was unethical, even by the standards of psychiatry in the 1950s, is an understatement. She was a monster -- worse than what she made "Sybil's" mother out to be. Projection perhaps? This book is about Wilbur and Schreiber and their unfettered ambition and in exposing them, Mason does a pretty good job. Where I think that she falters a bit is in failing to discuss WHY the diagnosis is so controversial and how the research into this phenomenon is so flawed. Most lay people (and some people who should know better) have a very poor understanding of what constitutes scientific inquiry and the nature of solid research versus anecdotal "evidence" and pseudoscience. If she brought up the issue of the research and how it has not stood up to scientific scrutiny, then she should have used the opportunity to follow up with a teachable moment. The book would also have benefited by interviews of some widely respected psychiatric researchers. Although there were a few interviews with professionals who had known Wilbur, interviewing the community of professionals who help bring down the MPD fiasco of the 80s and 90s would have helped. A few interviews with sociologists or social psychologists would also have helped; especially to bolster the hypothesis that this hysteria was a function of repressed women coming of age at a time when men dominated. I, frankly, found this to be unsupported by any facts and highly speculative. It would also have benefited by someone from the medical field's editing skills. The author writes that Flora died of a stroke and a heart attack. Uh, I don't think so. She died from one or the other, though she may have had both. Sloppy spots like this should be avoided if one is to be taken seriously as a conveyor of facts. I also found her documentation to be annoyingly scant and her getting into the heads of people who are long dead to be less than convincing. If what Connie or Flora thought is based on diaries, then really she should have indicated that. Overall, the book is flawed, but well written. I did learn something from it that I did not know in terms of how abusive Connie Wilbur was with respect to her patient(s) - and even in light of the times - how unethical. All in all, it was a cliff notes kind of approach to a very difficult subject, and it could have been a far more rigorous study of a shocking case of psychiatric malpractice and a phenomenon that helped light the fire of extremism that damaged untold women.

I read some of this book, skimmed through it really because I had heard of it's reputation (at a book store, didn't buy it). I put it down in disgust. I myself had a traumatic experience in childhood, and although I remembered it, I still can not remember the whole event. I have missing gaps that I can not explain, and only remember the basic details. This personal experience of mine is very typical for victims of trauma. This seems to be something the author doubts, completely. She seems to think this is impossible. I can personally assure her it is not. I have ready many books on PTSD, and I fit into the literature pretty perfectly (although I do not have dissociative identity disorder). These include triggers for the depression I experienced after the trauma, and the triggers that brought on that depression. I also was disgusted by the authors misrepresentation and generalizations of psychologists. I have had several psychologists over the years, and they were all great people, and helped my enormously. I can safely say that I fully recovered from PTSD within a year, maybe two (although disorders that manifested themselves after the trauma are still ongoing). They were not milking me for money, because my therapist told me that I didn't need him anymore, and I left him. I have other things I have to deal with, so I still see a psychiatrist, but I am only on low doses of medications and my prognosis is looking very good for the next couple years, with the strong possibility that I will not need medication. I have improved enormously over 9 years of treatment, and finally feel I am gaining my life back. Mental disorders, even one like depression, are completely debilitating. My depression was certainly VERY difficult for me to go through, and I still have trouble. I can only imagine what people with DID think of this journalists assertions. Believe it or not, people go into the fields of psychology and psychiatry, or become therapists for altruistic reasons. I myself am thinking of doing that. They are not all greedy people who manipulate their patients for money. I have several friends that are skeptical of those fields, but if you read the research, it really is meticulous. Have you heard of the diagnostic criteria for something like Major Depressive Disorder? It is VERY specific. As the fantastic Neil deGrasse Tyson said, "The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it." This author is only a journalist that is relying on pseudo-scientific (and ill-researched) reports to make a case about something she knows nothing about. She obviously is not qualified to judge the sources she relies on. This book just adds to the societal belief that psychology and psychiatry are hugely suspect. I have friends that are skeptical of psychology and psychiatry, and it almost offends me because I have benefited so much from the work of dedicated psychologists and a psychiatrist. I also have a friend that is completely non-functional without his medication (he has severe ADHD). Certainly, certain things about the field are not perfect. For example, ADHD and ADD are most probably over-diagnosed (the fact that common doctors can diagnose it doesn't help). My psychiatrist even believes that it is over-diagnosed. I personally believe I am on that spectrum, but it is not debilitating for me. Also, anti-depressants are not really wonder drugs (at all). The truth is, there are gaps in knowledge about these medicines and certain disorders. Certain things are hit and miss, and some things people pretend to understand when no one really understands. But to discount all the help that the field has done, and all the research that people have spent their lives on, is just ludicrous. All of that just makes me doubt everything she says about Sybil. How can I trust someone that relies on such dubious information, and makes such basic errors in logical thinking? The answer is, I can't. And if you are doubtful about psychologists and psychiatrists, wait until you need their help and benefit hugely from it before judging. I am only doing so well, and have regained hope for my future because of the hard-working psychologists and the psychiatrist I go to.

This book, while valuable, does a great disservice to patients and professionals who struggle with issues surrounding multiple personality disorder/dissociative identity disorder. Ms. Nathan builds a powerful case for the fact that "Sybil" was largely a fabrication--a combination of exaggeration and sensationalism. She has done a great deal of research and, as distressing and disappointing it is to discover that such a seminal work is a fraud, it's valuable to have this type of expose presented to the public. Anytime a "factual" book is exposed as a fabrication, doubt is cast on the existence of whatever the book is describing. Ms. Nathan contributes to this doubt, as she calls into question the validity of the diagnosis of MPD/DID, the validity of the concept of recovered memory, and the long-lasting impact of early childhood trauma on consciousness and perception of reality. It's true that many irresponsible therapists and others have asked children (or adults under hypnosis) leading questions, implanting the suggestion that perhaps they had been hideously abused. But it's also true that there are irresponsible practitioners of all kinds, and their irresponsibility does not raise questions about the condition they are misdiagnosing. For example, bipolar disorder is a real condition, well-documented and well-established. There are some healthcare practitioners who misinterpret the ordinary mood fluctuations of everyday life as "bipolarity" and incorrectly treat individuals who do not suffer from the condition. But this doesn't mean that bipolar disorder doesn't exist. Similarly with MPD/DID, and with the process of recovering traumatic childhood memories. There are indeed unscrupulous, biased or well-intentioned but ignorant practitioners who slant their questions based on answers they expect to receive and receive just the "answers" they are expecting. But does that mean the disorder doesn't exist, and is nothing more than a "fad" created by a coterie of ill-informed and misguided psychiatrists? Ms. Nathan also seems to believe that if child abuse cannot be confirmed by community or family members, it didn't exist. An earlier reviewer pointed out that child abuse is all too frequently ignored and covered up. Again, it may well be the case that Sybil's abuse was either fabrication or exaggeration. But the book implies that the failure of Connie and others to uncover hard facts about the abuse necessarily means that the abuse didn't take place. This does a great disservice to children who have been abused, but whose communities and families did not step forward to stop it, ignored clear signs, and turned a blind eye. One of the points the author makes is that the proliferation of the diagnosis of MPD/DID implies that it is a "fad." This is also a mistaken idea. Often, a condition that has previously been unknown or misdiagnosed rises in prevalence because now the condition has been identified. This is how science advances. For example, there is a rare eye condition called ocular lymphoma. It was almost unheard of until recently, when scientists identified the condition . Now, there are many more cases being diagnosed. One reason for the increase in diagnosis is that with advancing research, this condition was identified and scientists in the "ivory tower" hospitals began to educate community-based ophthalmologists about what to look for when they saw patients who had "benign floaters" that never went away. Now that these ophthalmologists knew what to look for, more cases were diagnosed--and more lives were saved. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of this book is that it minimizes the existence and long-term impact of child abuse. It implies that an adult cannot remember preverbal trauma, and that if an event is recalled in adulthood, it is false and has been the product of a manipulative therapist. This is a throwback to an earlier era when it was thought that children would "forget" and "get over" trauma and tragedy, but the vast trauma literature does not support this antiquated point of view. (I refer readers to the work of Bessel van der Kolk, a trauma expert at Harvard. I also refer people to the classic books on trauma, such as Waking the Tiger, The Body Remembers, and Trauma and Recovery). Therapists must learn how to responsibly help clients heal from the impact of child abuse. This means that when a child remembers abuse, acts it out in play, or reveals it through direct body-centered therapy, the abuse isn't dismissed as fantasy and is addressed therapeutically. .

I have been following the posts and am honestly nonplussed by the negative reviews and seemingly vitriolic attitude towards Ms. Nathan's work. What gives ? I read the original book, SYBIL, back in the 70's and was compelled by the story, as was everyone else at the time. Finding that it was largely fiction does not lessen the impact of the story - just as watching a very interesting and creative film does not disappoint me because it isn't a documentary. I don't pretend to be a psychiatrist or have that kind of background and training, but I do have a good BS detector. When I read the criticisms of SYBIL EXPOSED, it is obvious that it is the detractors who have the agenda here, not Ms. Nathan. If you read her book carefully, you will see that there is no dismissive attitude towards Shirley's suffering, or that of any other person diagnosed with MPD. Her objection is to the rapid and ubiquitous application of the diagnosis, directly attributable to the sensation caused by SYBIL. If one looks to the history and evolution of any field, there are always wrong turns in the path which must be admitted, and then remedied. If a time table of Psychiatry/Psychology were to be laid out, with Cornelia Wilbur's career and treatment of Shirley overlaid upon it, it would become clear that this story did not occur in isolation, divorced from the new discoveries, theories, and experimental practises which were rising and falling at the time. Please read the following article from Psychology Today: [...] The "bandwagon effect" cannot be discounted when delving into the world of MPD diagnosis and the fervor with which SYBIL EXPOSED is being attacked. From wiki: When individuals make rational choices based on the information they receive from others, economists have proposed that information cascades can quickly form in which people decide to ignore their personal information signals and follow the behavior of others. Cascades explain why behavior is fragile--people understand that they are based on very limited information. Treating a person who is obviously in pain and presenting disjointed or seemingly dissociative behaviors must surely be an arduous and herculean task. It seems pointless to overly dramatize a precarious situation by affixing a label such as MPD, or DID as it is now referred to. Ms. Nathan is trying to go back to the big bang of this unquantifiable - and therefore dangerously qualitative, subjective - diagnosis by meticulous sleuthing and plumbing the personalities and personal histories of the three women involved in what really amounts to one of the greatest pieces of fiction to come out of the 70's. By the way, have you wondered about the name "Sybil" and how it resonates with both of these books, Shirley's purloined story and Ms. Nathan's account ? The first known Greek writer to mention a sibyl is Heraclitus, in the 5th century BC: The Sibyl, with frenzied mouth uttering things not to be laughed at, unadorned and unperfumed, yet reaches to a thousand years with her voice by aid of the god. Wow ! Enough said, for both contexts !

Author Debbie Nathan is a journalist who has also written books such as

In the book Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case, Debbie Nathan embarks on an investigation to uncover the life and story of the real identity of "Sybil". Her investigation uncovers a web of deceit and unethical practices that center around the lives of three women-an unscrupulous female psychiatrist, an ambitious female author, and an easily manipulated patient who may have been taken advantage of. Debbie Nathan provides a minor historical context of the mental health profession's treatment of women-it's neglect, lack of formal ethics and over diagnosis of hysteria by male medical professionals. Nathan provides an argument that Shirley Mason, the patient also known as Sybil, was an impressionable woman who was oppressed by the rigid rules of her religion and suffered from unexplainable health problems. Nathan's claims suggest that the entire story about her multiple personalities was manufactured by an ambitious female psychiatrist who provided addictive drugs to Shirley and implanted false memories of abuse that never actually happened. `Sybil Exposed' has left me with even more questions and confusion, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Was Sybil even abused by her mother? Why wasn't Debbie Nathan ever able to confirm any cases of abuse? Were Shirley/Sybil and her psychiatrist having a relationship? Why did they live together? Did Shirley/Sybil even have any multiple personalities? How were they able to suddenly disappear the moment that her psychiatrist told her that she needed to be cured so that the book could be written? Was Shirley/Sybil taken advantage of by her psychiatrist, cured by her psychiatrist, or was she in on the scam all along? Do multiple personalities even really exist?? Although the book is a bit slow in the beginning as it provides a background of Shirley Mason's religion (i.e., Seventh Day Adventist) and provides a biography of the central characters in the book (Shirley, the psychiatrist and author), the storyline picks up and is an overall interesting and mysterious story. It's a must read if you enjoy biography, nonfiction, mental illness, science and issues of feminism.

Debbie Nathan is not a therapist or a researcher. She certainly picks titillating topics to write about - her previous works include books about pornography, ritual abuse , etc. I would say she is almost, well, obsessed with provocative, dark topics. But here's the thing: She is just a writer. When I was a newspaper feature writer, I once mentioned to my editor in chief that I was going to get the "best sources" for a story on mental illness that I was writing. The editor asked, "What gives you the ability to know who is the best in a field when you have no expertise yourself?" Later, after I completed my master's degree in counseling, I realized my editor had been spot on. For years, I had written authoritatively because I could access sources, write clearly, take accurate notes and had read a few articles on a subject. In reality, I simply did not have the background, training and experience to know the good and bad experts, the shades of gray in "facts," etc. Debbie Nathan doesn't know it, but she isn't really qualified to pick apart the psychohistory of Shirley Mason ("Sybil") nor to breathlessly analyze the motives of three women who have long since died. (nor am I.) She also does not understand that it is par for the course for a patient with dissociative identity disorder to suddenly retract admissions of abuse, etc. Any experienced therapist would know that. But then Ms. Nathan is not a therapist, researcher or otherwise expert. She is a writer, a provocative one who has written a book that was destined to be a bestseller the minute she first met with her agent and publisher, to discuss her expose of the "real Sybil." Katherine Lipkin , M.A.

I agree with Steve Almond that Debbie Nathan is one of the great unsung writers of our time and that this book is an amazing accomplishment. It is so well documented and carefully considered. I totally appreciate her brilliant synthesis of "investigative journalism and cultural criticism." An amazing analysis of 70s culture, women, the history and ongoing evolution of psychiatry (which is changing as we speak...), this book is a must read for any girl who grew up in the 70s, anyone who's had therapy--especially if it was billed as "psychoanalysis"--anyone who wondered in 1995 if being able to remember abuse suffered as a child would be the magic cure for their chronic depression, anyone who's read Malcolm Gladwell and is interested in cultural "contagions." Really, I think anyone would find this a good, fast, compelling read. Period. It's a great story beautifully written--what more do you want in a book? Is the book perfect? Was every single word verified? Were it possible!! Perhaps not. For example, Debbie and I talked about my time spent with Shirley while my mom and Connie swam laps. I think she says we sat by the pool waiting for them to finish. Well, we generally visited and talked inside the house while the other ladies swam. When the bubble was on the pool, there was no "poolside." It was all taken up by the cover. Oh, and guess what! I even found a typo!! DOES IT MATTER? Absolutely not. The fact of the matter is that Debbie Nathan accurately and compassionately captured the essence of two women who were special and wonderful parts of my childhood, and whom I knew for decades of my life. Therefore, I trust that she captured the important elements of her interviews with other folks she talked to as well. I was most impressed with her thorough research and documentation. I'd known this book was in the works for years and this particular element was the most surprising to me. I don't know why, but it was. People I knew in Lexington had told me about this "crazy New Yorker" who was trying to discredit the Sybil myth. By the second page of the book, I knew that Debbie Nathan was the real thing and that she'd taken this task very seriously. I was sad to read that Shirley had such a hard time. I continue to believe that people go to incredible lengths for love and acceptance and I also believe that Connie and Shirley vehemently believed in their story. I also believe that there is more to any story, which Debbie Nathan has expertly shown us. Life is complex and mental illness still one of its greatest mysteries. Thankfully, Nathan doesn't even attempt to give us definitive answers to these very complex matters. For me, however, she gave me a new way to think and question and doubt and trust. READ IT!!

Author Debbie Nathan is a journalist who has also written books such as

I read the book and saw the movie Sybil, many years ago. It was very disturbing to me at the time and haunted me for many years afterwards,in dreams too. I recently read Sybil Exposed by Debbie Nathan and also found it to be a fascinating and disturbing book. As so many of the people directly involved with this tragic case have already passed on, it is virtually impossible to know what and what is not to be believed from either story. Probably some of both book accounts have been embellished, edited and changed. But IMO, author Debbie Nathan appears to be a credible writer, sharing this story to the best of her ability and not with some hidden agenda as some reviewers have mentioned here, quite vehemently at times. What I came away with after reading both of these books and the reviews here was: you can't and shouldn't accept any real-life story as the absolute truth, in any case. When it comes to the story of "Sybil" that seems to be even more relevant advice than usual.

An interesting but deeply flawed book. Debbie Nathan, while doing phenomenal research, is quite biased in interpretation of the facts. Her thesis is that Multiple Personality Disorder, now Dissociative Identity Disorder, is an iatrogenic disorder, i.e. caused by the therapists - which totally ignores all the physiological research in the disorder at the Nat. Institute of Mental Health. She would have you believe that therapists flocked to this disorder to make more money, politicians hyped child sexual abuse causes for publicity, and that therapists have fled from the diagnosis. She cites the troubled False Memory Syndrome Foundation as a valid source of information. She ignores the corroboration of abuse histories via witnesses, confessions, photographs and cites the FBI's disbelief in Satanic rituals. Had she interviewed the State and Federal Park police re evidence of such rituals, she would have gotten a very different answer. That said, it is an interesting view of the evolution of psychiatry from heavy chemical experimentations to insulin shock to electro-convulsive shock therapy. Certainly, her research into Dr. Cornelia Wilbur portrayed a brilliant therapist who certainly violated boundary issues even of that day and time. Her portrayal of Flora Shreiber, the writer of Sybil, was fascinating in the evolution of biographical writing, dressing up facts with a heavy dose of fiction. I wasn't convinced that Sylvia (aka Sybil) Mason's symptoms were all due to pernicious anemia. Nathan downplayed her fugue states and other dissociative symptoms. In her description of all three women, Nathan's portrait of Sylvia is the least convincing. Nathan's thesis that the public fascination with "multiplicity" was simply a metaphor for the fractured life of women at that time misses the deeper issue - which is that the "Self" of either gender is no longer understood as a unitary entity but that we all have a repertory company of contextual "selves" within us. The difference between the normal from the pathological condition of multiplicity is defined by the presence of amnesia as one moves from one self to another. It is a truth that all diagnoses carry cultural assumptions; it does not make them any less valid but rather they need to be understood as limited by the state of knowledge at that time.

Though author Debbie Nathan seemed to spare no criticism for either psychiatrist Cornelia Wilbur or author Flora Rheta Schreiber, she had no question that the real Sybil -- Shirley Mason really did suffer during her life. If we trust Wilbur and Schreiber the reason for Mason's suffering was because she afflicted with Multiple Personality Disorder (now DID) a condition where an individual creates new personalities in extreme situations like the result of a trauma. If we trust Nathan Mason suffered not because of DID but rather because she was misdiagnosed by Wilbur and then later used by both Wilbur and Schreiber as a ticket to greater fame and fortune on their part. Sadly for such an important book this book doesn't provide enough information to guide us certainly in either direction. That being said those inside the DID community like any group of patients are probably best advised to not only to make sure that their condition has been thoroughly examined and properly diagnosed but also that they make sure to keep on top of new research about it so that they can better manage their situation. For those outside the DID community especially those tending to think that the diagnosis is a bogus one they would be advised to make sure that they responsibly consider all the arguments and data that support the existence of DID. The last thing we need is another group of people who are legitimately disabled from being unfairly stigmatized as the result of their condition.

I'm of the wrong era to have been obsessed with Sybil and her multiple personalities, and have never read the book or seen the movies, but I always have an interest in reading books about mental health, and this one was recommended highly to me. I think we all know the basic premise of Sybil: a young woman, while under psychiatric care, manifests some 16 personalities, ranging from Ruthie (a baby) to Peggy Lou (assertive and angry) to The Blonde (an optimistic teen.) The book was released in 1973 and helped popularize the diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder (then called multiple personality disorder.) Author Debbie Nathan re-examines the famous case under a new lens, and posits that not only was the diagnosis a hoax but that Sybil's psychoanalyst, Dr. Connie Wilbur, had been searching for a patient with multiple personalities to make her famous. Shirley Ardell Mason (referred to as Sybil in the resulting book and movie in order to protect her identity) was in her 20s when she began seeing Dr. Wilbur, and her condition quickly declined. Although Mason had always had some amount of psychological issues, the 16 personalities that developed over time came about only while under psychological supervision. Nathan's research into Mason's story is extensive, and, although Dr. Wilbur's case files are sealed, documents from the archives and library of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice are used to support Nathan's theory. The resulting book tells an alternate history of the still famous story and discredits aspects of the field of psychology, especially as relating to multiple personality disorder. I thoroughly enjoyed this read, and now have plans to go back and read the original Sybil and then watch the 1976 version of the movie starring Sally Fields.

Why did the author feel compelled to convince people that Sybil was forcefully diagnosed with BPD due to Dr. Wilbur utilizing hypnotic and medicinal therapy? The author has not written a book, instead it is a collection of her own opinions. But she needed validation to make the reader believe her. This is easily obtained by searching for specialists who share the same theories and opinions, and then using that information, writing it in a way to make the reader think that ALL specialists disagree with Dr. Wilbur's treatment of Sybil. She then accuses Dr. Wilbur of diagnosing Sybil by using suggestive interrogation! The author tells the reader she got her information for her book strictly from Sybil's medical records, therefore, once again fooling the reader. The author hand-picked and chose information that she NEEDED to put in her book to make you think Sybil's MPD was a myth. The author has a total lack of knowledge of MPD. She is not a psychoanalyst, has no educational background of any type of mental disorder. She has not written research papers, or performed any professional testing on patients diagnosed with MPD. Basically, she is not a credible source. She is a photo journalist.

As Shirley Mason's closest living relative, I was close to her for the 30 plus years through the saga of her life journey. In fact, I was with her the weekend prior to her death, at her request, and was one of the only people that was in constant contact with her all those years. I kept her identity confidential at her fervent request. Through all these years up until literally the day before she died, she verified the complete accuracy of the book, 'Sybil'. Many people called me for interviews. I refused all of them, and did not keep track of who called or dates of the calls. Debbie Nathan says that she has record of calling me. I am not aware of the names of any one that called me.. Knowing Dr. Connie Wilbur, and Flora Shrieber also, the book concerns me greatly. It is an attack on their credibility, their research, and their professionalism. And, the book is a complete attack on the person I loved, Shirley Mason. Naomi Rhode, cousin of Shirley Mason

Won't read the book and here's why. I have personally seen someone with Dissociative Identity Disorder. They are in my family, and I don't appreciate people staring at this tragedy like it's a freak show. Our lives have been HELL since all of her symptoms developed, and I wish with all my heart and everything I have that this weren't true. The trauma that caused it was extreme, sadistic, and repetitive. DID is a survival mechanism that a small child's brain uses to cope with an unbearable, life threatening situation inflicted on them maliciously by other people. The child is NOT mentally ill prior to the trauma, and struggles to maintain control of the internal chaos to keep up appearances. This is why people who are not living with them think they are making the condition up. If you want scientific, research based information, read Stranger in the Mirror by Dr. Steinberg. She is a psychiatrist who researched the subject for 10 years at an ivy-league college, not a random journalist who wrote a book discrediting a traumatized child. I never read the original Sybil either- I'm not happy with the circus that came out of it, but I did finally watch the 2007 remake of Sybil and I have to say it's a very accurate portrayal of the intense agony people with DID experience. By the way, my family member was not seeing a therapist when she developed the disorder, and had never been to one. This is to the person (CritThink) who deleted their comment. In the professional world, it is an accepted diagnosis.

Debbie Nathan is at best taking events out of context and at worst consciously perpetrating a fraud by twisting the meaning of the events she cites. This is not the first book she has written in an attempt to discredit cases of extremely horrific child abuse; she seems to be a journalist who has taken on the cause of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. I urge the reader to read (or reread) Flora Schreiber's book, SYBIL. There you will find much more information about the allegations that Nathan makes. For instance: the involvement of Dr. Herbert Spiegel and of Sybil's roommate, Teddy; the short-term use of pentothal near the end of the eleven-year analysis and how it helped to begin the integration process; the denial letter, in which Sybil wrote that she was making it all up--this was actually followed by another letter in which she explained why she had written the first letter and how she lost two days of time after it! Dr. Suraci (see his review here)--who personally KNEW Sybil, Dr. Wilbur, and Schreiber--is having his own book republished. I would suggest that you save your money for that book instead!

I remember watching the movie Sybil, marveling at the wonder of how her many personalities protected her from the awful abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother, and how touching it was at the end when Sally Field reintegrated all of her "selves" and comforted and healed them. But as we see from this exhaustively researched, fascinating book, SYBIL EXPOSED, this iconic multiple personality case was basically an elaborate hoax, perpetrated by an ambitious psychiatrist desperate to make a name for herself, who manipulated a frail troubled and dependent young woman, and a journalist, more concerned with writing a best seller than in telling the truth. Author Debbie Nathan convincingly reconstructs lives of the 3 women using extensive archival material, tapes and interviews with surviving people who knew them. Revealed is the complex, totally unethical relationship that the psychiatrist Connie Wilbur had with Sybil, dosing her heavily with powerful barbiturates, administering electroshocks, and then making strong suggestions that she was horribly abused as a child. In these sessions Wilbur coaxed her to reveal her other "personalities" and interpreted impossible fantasies babbled while under sedation, as literal truth. It was a case of a doctor formulating a theory, and then doing whatever was necessary to make her patient conform to that "diagnosis". It took an limelight craving author and a screen writer to further flesh out the fantasies to make the story more sensational and sympathetic. It is fascinating to watch how they are first reluctant and sceptical when it becomes obvious to them that the allegations against Sybil's mother, and the assertions of Sybil's strange behavior were false, but as they become more invested in the project they shamelessly embellish the story to make it more engaging and cinematic. This is anything but a one-dimensional story. Nathan reveals with some compassion how Dr. Wilbur, while behaving unethically and irresponsibly, also really seemed to care for Sybil, letting her visit regularly and even live in her home. Wilbur probably believes that she is actually helping, even as she is using the helplessly dependent Sybil to garner the professional accolades she so craves. Nathan presents us with the historical and social context in which the events occur... primarily the upheaval in the roles of women, and the personal turmoil that created. She offers insightful analyses of why the Sybil tale was so widely embraced, and why the diagnosis multiple personality skyrocketed after SYBIL was published. It also serves as a cautionary tale for the way some psychotherapies can be abused and cause great harm. As I read through some of the negative reviews of this book on this site, it appears that many of the reviewers have a professional and personal stake in the veracity of the original story. My advice is, read the book and decide for yourselves.

I read Sybil many years ago as a teenager and was totally fascinated with the original book. When I saw Sybil Exposed, I decided to see what the 'true' story was. I tried to read with an open mind, but to me Nash comes across as a jealous woman, someone who came into the story with preconceived notions. I admit that I may be reading this whole thing wrong, but having the book come out after all of the people involved are dead, is not fair. I do not honestly have an opinion as to whether or not Sybil had all of the personalities or if she was just a victim of psychoanalysis. I just pray that all involved now rest in peace.

This book is shocking and sad and far more believable than the original Sybil turned out to be. I agree with some of the naysayers here who believe Debbie Nathan goes too far in completely discrediting MPD. While it looks like "Sybil" may not have been a victim of the disease, I'm not prepared to say that no one, anywhere, has suffered from it. HOWEVER, there is something wildly inappropriate about the way Dr. Wilbur encouraged Sybil's dependence. Patients with far less severe maladies would be damaged by having a shrink blur all lines, encourage calls at all hours, take vacations together ... Some on this board have complained that Shirley Mason is diminished or belittled by this book. I disagree. She is portrayed as a sick girl who wanted help and was courageous enough to keep seeking it. It's unfortunate that she fell under the spell of a doctor who had a diagnosis and was just searching for a patient to fulfill it. Shirley was exploited, first by Wilbur and then by FLS. Child abuse is a real tragedy, depression keeps countless people from fully enjoying life. Saying I appreciate this book doesn't mean I don't get that, or that Nathan doesn't seem to realize it. It means that Sybil was a marketing creation and Shirley Mason's life was a heartbreaking tragedy.

I know I have said this 1000 times but I am a lucky girl in that book companies give me books to review. It never gets old when I get asked to review a book that sparks my interest. I was recently asked to review a book that I couldn't say no to...it was called Sybil Exposed-The extraordinary story behind the famous multiple personality case. Admittedly I had ever seen the movie or read the book Sybil despite the fact that I teach psychology. So I went into this book only knowing general information about the story of Sybil. This book was AMAZING!!!! Seriously one of the best non-fiction books I have read. Probably second to Unbroken. The writer is Debbie Nathan who is a journalist so this book reads as though you are reading the transcript to a 20/20 special. Throughout the book you get to find out the real story of Sybil, her therapist, and the writer of the book. What you find out is shocking...like shock and awe shocking. It becomes clear to Nathan throughout her research that the real Sybil was not as sick as was portrayed in the book. That through a combination of embellishments by her doctor and the writer her real mental illness was nothing like what was portrayed in the book Sybil. Also, more disturbing was the fact that her therapist partially made up her diagnosis and didn't help Sybil get better, she often times made her worse. Including implanting memories into her subconscious while Sybil was highly drugged and under hypnosis. This book touches on so many aspects of the things that I teach in my psychology class. It discusses medical ethics, proper scientific method, and a doctor's responsibility to keeping her patients needs first rather than the what he/she thinks is best. At the end of the this book I found myself questioning something that I never had before-Is DID (multiple personality disorder's new name) as prevalent as doctor's say it is. This book points out that Sybil and her case led to a huge rise in multiple personality diagnosis and this case was not even real. So scary to think that because of this how many people have been given a false diagnosis. Also at the end of this book I felt sad for the real Sybil. She had her mental health manipulated and as Nathan points out she could have lived a much more normal life then she did. She was forced into a a life of illness and infamy that she did not really deserve. I would give this book five stars and for me it is a must for anyone who is interested in psychology or mental illness.

In "Sybil Exposed," Debbie Nathan has written a fascinating and important expose of how the most famous case of so-called multiple personality disorder (MPD) was essentially a hoax. Shirley Mason, aka “Sybil,” was clearly a mentally disturbed woman, but she did not have MPD, a largely discredited condition today that Shirley’s psychiatrist Dr. Connie Wilbur built a career on in the 1950s and ‘60s. Dr. Wilbur was looking for evidence of MPD caused by childhood abuse and Shirley, needy and eager to please, delivered, dreaming up lurid tales of being tortured and traumatized by her mother. Thanks to Dr Wilbur and Flora Schreiber’s subsequent book "Sybil," thousands of other, almost all women, would be diagnosed with MPD in coming years and dream up similar stories. And so the damage caused by Wilbur’s ambition spread outward like a wave, tearing families apart and hurting countless people and even sending some to prison, falsely accused. I found "Sybil" author Schreiber particularly interesting in this story, having just read Michael Finkel’s book "True Story." In 2002, Finkel got fired from the New York Times and publicly humiliated for playing around with the facts in a magazine piece. Back in the 1960s, Schreiber got a half-million-dollar advance for a book (which she split, incidentally, with Wilbur and Mason) that was virtually a wholesale fabrication, and no one was the wiser. Until now. I did not find in "Sybil Exposed" any of the “bias” or “character assassination” that some detractors allege here in the one-star reviews. Her book is thoroughly researched and the facts fairly presented.

While there may be some merit to this book, much of what is 'exposed' is actually speculation based on careful 'curation' of evidence towards a specific end. Very little consideration is given as to what the significance of each piece of evidence has or could have. So, you have a piece of evidence where the subject denies having the disorder in a letter, which is used to 'expose' that subject did not have the disorder. Okay, since that evidence is the only actual piece of evidence given, we can take it into consideration, but it seems strange that a large body of evidence would be simply ignored for this single piece of evidence. And what of the significance of this piece of evidence? It is taken as being 'God's word' without question, despite the fact that denials are common for a wide variety of disorders.... like alcoholism. "Hey, doctor, I'm not an alcoholic, trust me." Apparently saying that is enough to not be an alcoholic? That's some flawed logic the author of this book uses to frame the 'exposing.' And after that, it's hard to take the rest of the book as credible, because whose going to take the time to go through all the notes to check the methods behind the rest of the claims. Worse, I'd say it's fairly dangerous because of the broader implications, fitting into a now well-discredited idea that MPD/DID is just a fad.

When I saw that Net Galley was offering "Sybil Exposed" by Debbie Nathan for review, I knew that I had to get my hands on it. Ms. Nathan describes in different chapters, the lives of Shirley Mason (Sybil), Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, and Flora Schreiber (the author of Sybil), and how they come together to form Sybil Inc. MPD (Multiple Personality Disorder) or DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) as they call it now has fascinated me since I read the book Sybil and saw the Sally Field television movie in high school. Back then I thought that it was a very disturbing and heartbreaking story especially since it was all "true." After reading Sybil Exposed, I now know that almost all of it was fabricated just to achieve fame and fortune, but to whose expense? Sybil herself, which we learn is a girl named Shirley Mason. Shirley entered Dr. Wilbur's office as an inspiring college art student who yes, had problems, but not to the extent she does after spending a lifetime under Dr. Wilbur's care. During each therapy session, Dr. Wilbur gives Shirley intravenous sodium pentothal or truth serum (as well as other drugs and electroshocks) under hypnosis which drums up her different personalities and so called memories of childhood abuse. In today's medical profession, practices such as these would be considered unethical. Overall, I thought this was a well-researched enlightening look into the background of the "Sybil" phenomenon that sold over 6 million copies back in 1973. Is it fact or fiction? I guess we'll never really know.

Sybil Exposed is a long overdue antidote to the myths created by the a multi-media outlet blockbuster of a generation (or two) ago. While it was explosive when it came out, there was plenty of skepticism. Many felt it had a PT Barnum aura, and Dick Cavett's question on p. 175 (hoax?) was common. While the public was very interested, but not fully sold, this book shows that it was influential in the field of psychiatry. Debbie Nathan does a great job of introducing the three women who literally created Sybil. First is Shirley Mason, Sybil's prototype; and then there is Dr. Cornelia Wilbur who created her; and Flora Schreiber who created her a second time. (A third creator, Stewart Stern, scriptwriter of the TV special on Sybil gets a mention.) Nathan unfolds the three stories such that you feel that you understand the people and how the Sybil phenomenon came to be. There is an interesting portrait of the time and the state of psychiatry and journalism. Dr. Wilbur was able to experiment with drugs, electric shock, even lobotomies, and fraternize with her patients without much scrutiny. (Not too many years earlier, Freud and Jung had intimate relations with their patients.) Wilbur has her patients in her home; she hires them, and in the case of Shirley/Sybil, shares vacations. Despite Wilbur's professional writing defining homosexuality as a mental disorder, her closeness to Shirley/Sybil suggests a lesbian relationship. Flora Schreiber's style of journalism was perfect for the time. With more and more ad revenue going to TV, to keep their readership magazines got more sensational. An anecdote about Terry Morris, mother of political commentator, Dick Morris helps define this era of journalism. She served as president of Society for Magazine writers and wrote in a guidebook for magazine writers: "I have never permitted myself to become fettered by the "'facts'." Nathan shows that how in this environment, Schreiber's career flourished. The Sybil story could be seen as a logical step for where her writing was going. Just as Dr. Wilbur manipulated Sybil to fit her needs, Schreiber (and later, Stewart Stern) spotted the holes in the Wilbur-Mason story, and filled them to meet the needs of the publication. This is a very good portrayal of what happened and how Sybil and the theory of multiple personalities was developed in the public mind.

I really wanted to beleive that the story of Sybil is true, but after reading Sybil Exposed it seems clear to me that the story of Sybil written by Flora Rhetta Schreiber may not be completly true. Debbie Nathans research is very convincing and it does make sense to me that a story like Sybil could have been easily exaggerated. I feel that Sybil was someone who really needed help. She was diagnosed wtih MPD, and that is all anyone cared about. She didn't get help tailored to her as an individual to really see what was wrong and how she felt. Maybe if her doctor had tried to see who she was as a whole person instead of focusing so much on her other personalities she would have been better able to help her. I also feel that people involved didn't make enough of an effort to keep her anonymous. We may never know the absolute true story of Sybil, but I thought that this book was very interesting from cover to cover. Once you read it you can make up your own mind.

There's much to like about Sybil Exposed. I was mad for the book, Sybil, as a teenager, and my daughter just read it. Such a fascinating story. I was interested to read about Connie Wilbur's rise in the psychology field. Nathan presents her as a very single-minded, self-serving person--right up until her death. She has less of a bead on Shirley Mason (Sybil). My big frustration with the book is the same I have with many contemporary biographies. In the writer's quest to entertain the reader and make characters come alive, she imbues her characters with on-scene emotions and small, illuminating actions and reactions that seem more assumed and inferred than documented. Nathan's portrait of Mattie, Shirley's mother, comes to mind. Poor Shirley just comes off as badly confused and needy. Her relationship with Wilbur more than borders on the creepy. The second half of the book has the feel of a more documented story. There are records and sales figures, letters and memos extant. Nathan makes a good case for MPD being a sort of flavor-of-the-month diagnosis that later gave rise to the repressed memory hysteria of the 1990s. Less solid are Nathan's intimations that the rise in MPD diagnosis--and Shirley's story in particular-- directly reflected women's frustration with their sex-bound roles in 20th century society. Writing about Stewart Stern, the Sybil screenwriter: "Either way, Stern seemed to understand that Connie and her patient were the victims and heroines of a pre feminist era--and that his fact evoked great enthusiasm from women readers of the book." He had even made up a scene in which Wilbur and her theories were "laughed at because she was a female doctor." It's interesting that Flora Schreiber, author of Sybil, was irate about the "invented" scene. Wilbur never seems to have complained of confronting sexism in her work. Nathan's book has plenty to recommend it without the feminist background hook. In the end, I simply felt dreadful for all of the people involved, especially Shirley Mason. I would love to share the diagnostic bombshell that Nathan supplies quite near the end of Sybil Exposed. But I won't. It's worth reading the book to find out what her (very plausible) conclusion is.

I thought the historical narratives of the three women's lives the only good part in this book. It's so obvious Nathan despises these three women she's never met, especially Dr. Wilbur and that she has an agenda. She cannot know what was in Shirley's mind yet she's pretty descriptive with Shirley's thoughts during childhood. Her lack of research into some of the claims in the book Sybil is glaringly obvious. How does she know Mattie Mason was NEVER diagnosed as a schizophrenic. How does she claim to know the conversations between Dr. Wilbur and Mr. Mason? Is she clairvoyant? Why does she try to make the reader disgusted with practices performed by DR. Wilbur, i.e. "notice the size of the huge needle" Ahem yeah they used those back in the 30's and 40's. Medical procedures and techniques have advanced since leeches were used. This book is just basically pieces of truth with the author's opinion woven into them. She takes facts out of context and makes them seem like we should all be disgusted or aghast at medical practices from the 20's, 30's and 40's. Many of Shirley's childhood friends have confirmed Mattie Mason's relieving herself on neighbour's property, that she was mean and cruel to Shirley, that she ridiculed her and took Christmas gifts from her, peering into the neighbours windows at night. That she angrily pounded the piano keys and pedals, that she was loud and rude and brash and that she was odd. That she laughed like a witch. Back in the 20's and 30's no one knew anything about child abuse yet Nathan believes because no one reported it, it didn't happen. Her outing Shirley as a lesbian in love with Wilbur and Wilbur in love with Shirley was the last straw for me. This book was disgustingly bad, a work of fiction and only confirmed for me that Shirley did have MPD/DID. Don't waste your money buying it.

Debbie Nathan, who co-authored with Attorney Michael Snedeker a seminal work of American social history, SATAN'S SILENCE, has written a new book on her own entitled SYBIL EXPOSED, about the falsity of the sixteen personalities alleged to exist within the patient about whom a famous TV miniseries was made. In the course of SATAN'S SILENCE, a spectacular display of scholarship and intellectual honesty, Nathan casually mentions, among other myths, that Dr. Cornelia Wilbur suggested the sixteen personalities to Sybil, whose real name was Shirley Mason. The thrust of SATAN'S SILENCE is the innocent day care workers and schoolteachers who were sentenced to multiple life terms in prison based on testimony extorted from children by ambitious social workers like Kee McFarlane, who saw a chance to get attention by creating an actual social and judicial mechanism for prosecuting ritual abuse cases. Brilliantly, Nathan and Snedeker argue that the wild fantasies of the children were actually the fantasies of the police and social workers, projected onto the children. Even more brilliantly, the two authors hark back to the interrogations of the Salem Witch Trials, the Blood Libels, even Ancient Greece, where similar episodes occurred. The ten-year panic did not end until the children began to accuse the police and social workers of sodomizing them, making them eat feces covered with chocolate, taking them to locations where people and and animals were slaughtered, etc. At this point some doubt began to emerge among the authorities. However, some of the falsely accused teachers and day care workers remain in prison even now. SATAN'S SILENCE is an extremely disturbing book which makes us realize how irrational a putatively rational society can become. And how primitive the reactions of apparently educated and rational people can be. There is a clear link between SATAN'S SILENCE and SYBIL EXPOSED. Both books focus on mediocre people who see a chance to be in the limelight and perhaps to make money by exploiting a situation. in SATAN'S SILENCE it was the doctors and social workers who made themselves famous and respected by lying about the results they achieved with the children. in SYBIL EXPOSED it is Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, Shirley's psychiatrist, and Flora Rheta Schreiber, the author of the book SYBIL, who are the opportunists. The diagnosis of Shirley Mason with multiple personality disorder was based on sketchy and possibly non-existent evidence. Dr. Wilbur saw the opportunity to become famous by proselytizing the disorder and getting it accepted (like lobotomy) by the credulous psychiatric community. For a long time she succeeded, until, like the authorities in SATAN'S SILENCE, those in positions of medical authority began to doubt her evidence. Significantly, the technique of interrogation (reminiscent of the classic police third degree) is identical in both books. The subject is told, "We know you were abused, so you might as well tell us the truth. The other children have already told us." And with Shirley Mason, under heavy IV doses of Pentothal (which addicted her, by the way), "I know there are more personalities. You just have to work harder to overcome your resistance and bring them out." To please the interrogator and to stop the harassing, coercive questions, the child or the patient eventually says "Yes." Meanwhile, Flora Rheta Schreiber, a frustrated magazine writer, in possession of the dubious materials provided by Wilbur, flipped a coin and decided to write a melodramatic book incorporating all the most improbable events of Shirley's story, in order to make money. The book became a bestseller, the mini-series with Joanne Woodward and Sally Field had huge TV ratings, and not a word of the story was true. Dr. Wilbur went on promoting her theory of multiple personality in the face of increasing criticism until her death. Flora Rheta Schreiber lost most of the money she had made from SYBIL in the pursuit of another bestseller that ended up as a critical failure and incurred multiple lawsuits based on her creative use of facts. She died in 1988. Ironically, Shirley Mason did far better in her life when she was not in contact with Cornelia Wilbur. She functioned normally as an art teacher, had her own apartment, etc. But each time Wilbur re-entered the picture, Shirley got sicker and became virtually incapacitated. (Her only real illness, by the way, was pernicious anemia. This disease created the minor symptoms which Wilbur inflated into sixteen -- more than sixteen -- personalities.) Shirley, still clinging to the Seventh-Day Adventism she had embraced since childhood, died in 1998 of cancer. The sordidness of her story, the decades of her dependence on Dr. Wilbur (the two lived together for years), the exploitation of her illness (which was not multiple personality disorder), did not seem to affect her beliefs about herself and her doctor. Debbie Nathan reminds us that SYBIL is still being taught in schools, just as many of the victims of the ritual abuse panic remain in prison despite the fact that they did absolutely nothing to the children. "A lie goes around the world while the truth is still tying its shoelaces," as the saying goes. Of necessity SATAN'S SILENCE is the more imposing book, because of its vast scope and implications. SYBIL EXPOSED is a smaller story about two sleazy people who used a helpless mental patient to further their own careers. But the implications of both books are the same. They warn us that collective fantasy and superstition on the part of modern individuals and professionals are a real danger to society as well as to the many victims. We live in a world not so far removed from McCarthyism, not so far removed from lynching, not so far removed from xenophobia. "Civilized" modern society is more a shibboleth than a reality. It could be argued, based on Freud's theory that "the government reserves violence for itself, like a monopoly, while forbidding it to the individual," that the entire political world around us, ruled by constant war and genocide, results from precisely the disorder that Debbie Nathan describes: a primitive streak in modern Man that is not acknowledged and therefore rampages further each year, while historians scratch their heads and wonder why this anomaly persists. Both books are highly recommended for their thoroughness and remarkable intellectual honesty. Finally, the Amazon reviewers who claim that Nathan is minimizing, denying or trivializing DID have not understood the book. Debbie Nathan is describing a patient who was mistakenly diagnosed with multiple personality by a psychiatrist who wanted fame and fortune. This does not mean that DID does not exist and is not an important disorder. To say that Nathan is denying DID is like saying, "Those who say the War in Iraq is wrong are not being fair to the Iraq veterans." Adding apples to oranges.

I consider this to be no more or less credible than the original production of Sybil. First of all, I dont believe this writer is any way trained in Psychology. I find it a bit shocking that she describes Sybil’s DID in the way she does.... she says in the video “Helpful and Sexy”. I don’t think she saw the same Sybil I did, because there was nothing Helpful or sexy about the condition. Bottom line, I dont know who told the truth, and who lied and I think this writer is just trying to cash in on the public just as the Doctor and writer cashed in on a woman who obviously had real problems. I am a student of Psychology and I can tell you there are many things the medical world does not yet understand about the body and the mind. I believe that is why we are constantly trying to learn and evolve. I think it is wrong and ignorant to cast more doubt on people suffering by trying to claim she has “debunked” the case. If many world renowned doctors cant solve this, I highly doubt this writer did. I think the only thing she solved was to fatten her bank account and make it a even more difficult world for those who do truly suffer.

Despite what the "exposed" in the title might imply, Ms. Nathan's book manages to treat the three women behind "Sybil" with compassion. The introduction sets the tone for the book by taking a step back and examining the cultural context of Sybil, musing on why its subject had such an impact for a generation of TV viewers (and readers), and asking us to remember what these three women were facing in terms of their individual quests for -- for lack of a better term -- personal fulfillment. Nathan doesn't absolve them of responsibility, but -- while regaling us with shocking detail after detail -- does ask us to consider with sympathy why these women might have made each of the decisions they did, all of which added up to create a massive fraud. Nathan is not out to debunk MPD, though she seems to think it's done more harm than good. The APA has done its own fine job of backpedaling on the diagnosis, to the safer ground of DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder), which leaves room for dissociative disorders that manifest as multiples, but discourages mental health professionals from inadvertently leading their patients down the "alters" road. I don't see an agenda in Ms. Nathan's book, apart from telling a really damn good story, putting in its proper context, and making readers think. I'm the kind of non-fiction reader who keeps a bookmark in the footnotes section so I can judge an author's claims for myself, by considering the credibility of their sources. I was satisfied that this book presented credible and specific sources. At times, Nathan acknowledged her lack of facts, as in the story of Flora Schreiber's possible childhood molestation. Nathan essentially says here's what I know, here's what my journalistic instinct tells me, here's why it makes sense to me, but I just can't say for sure. That's the mark of a mature, confident writer, not a hack. Ms. Nathan's book is simply outstanding research and writing that I could barely put down between reading sessions.

There is another Amazon book on Kindle: SYBIL in her own words: The Untold Story of Shirley Mason, Her Multiple Personalities and Paintings [Kindle Edition] by Patrick Suraci Ph.D. that refutes this book quite adequately. It is a pity that anyone with an ax to grind against Dissociative Identity Disorder should get such publicity. I have heard Nathan talk on the radio in an interview and her information is just plain wrong and apparently based on personal ideas, not facts, as are found with Dr. Suraci's book.

For the truth I read Patrick Suraci's book "SYBIL in her own words: The Untold Story of Shirley Mason, Her Multiple Personalities and Paintings" which is also available on Amazon. The comment from Daniel Houlihan sounds strangely similar to Debbie Nathan's rants. He also makes the same mistakes she does. Peter Swales never wrote a book about the Sybil case. Mr. Swales did write a book "Freud, Fliess, and fratricide: The Role of Fliess in Freud's conception of paranoia" (1982). Mr. Swales did work with Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen on the Sybil case, but they parted ways, and Borch-Jacobsen went on to write "Making Minds and Madness: From Hysteria to Depression." It was published in Paris in French as Ms. Nathan points out and goes on to say that practically no one in America read it. However, Ms. Nathan does not tell us that it was published by Cambridge University Press in English in May 2009. Borch-Jacobsen's book is for sale on the Amazon web site for $118.00. Ms. Nathan also does not mention another book that attempted to disprove the original SYBIL book: "The Bifurcation of the Self" published by Springer Science + Business Media, Inc. in 2006. Incidentally this book is also available on Amazon for $74.95. These authors examined the same Schreiber archives which Nathan has distorted and added fictional tales to the documents which she cites. It's a shame that she and Mr. Houlihan are interfering with Amazon earning all that money.

Although Debbie Nathan has read mountains of research about Sybil, whose real name was Shirley Mason, it seems to me that she begins with a bias against Multiple Personality Disorder, which never really disappears from her writing. The main premise of Ms. Nathan's book is that Shirley's psychiatrist, Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, forced Shirley to remember events that did not occur. Ms. Nathan claims that because Dr. Wilbur used overdoses of drugs on Shirley, the girl came up with "false memories." I think Sybil Exposed is a great discredit to Shirley Mason, who lived most of her life in treatment for Multiple Personality Disorder, now called Dissociative Identity Disorder. She was a recluse because of her mental problems and the fame produced by the book Sybil, written by Flora Rheta Schreiber in 1973. Shirley Mason died on February 26, 1998, but her courage lives on, despite Ms. Nathan's efforts to discredit her.

Sybil Exposed is a brilliant piece of investigation and analysis -- not to mention a riveting read -- by one of America's most scrupulous and smart journalists. Nathan isn't just scrupulous and smart; by any definition, she's an expert in these issues, having reported on them for two decades. Nathan does not have an ax to grind. Her research is voluminous; she checks and triple-checks every detail. She is fair and sympathetic to all three women. She puts the story of "Sybil" in the context of the history of psychiatry and cultural changes -- particularly for women -- from the 1950s through the 60s. The virulence with which psychologists and even patients are defending the "truth" of "dissociative identity disorder" (formerly known as multiple personality disorder -- the name was changed when that theory was thoroughly discredited is in itself evidence of the ideological and emotional attachment people have to this idea. One of the many virtues of Nathan's book is her complex narrative of the origins of this ideology and her deconstruction of this intense attachment. In spite of claims of scientific validity in any direction, psychology is still as much art or philosophy as it is science. It reflects people's desires and the way the world looks at any given moment in history. As Nathan has said in interviews, scientists real or fraudulent are not exempt from worldly influences, from the demands of reputation or the desire for fame and fortune. It therefor behooves all of us to be skeptical of any seemingly unbelievable psychiatric tale. If it's unbelievable, it's likely not to be entirely true. SYbil Exposed is masterpiece of informed skepticism. Read it.

Sybil romanticized multiple personality disorder but led us away from the true results of traumatic, prolonged childhood sexual abuse. In our hospital the abused have only one personality; mentally ill. The abuse they suffered breaks their mind, leading them into an interior Hell in which they must reside for the rest of their lives. Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder; I'm of the opinion that these "diseases" are just signs of a mind conquered by abuse. If humanity can ever bring its self to stop taking advantage of the helpless we would see a precipitious decline in mental illness diagnoses. Has anyone read "When Rabbit Howls." Another Sybil like book.

You don't know how badly I have wanted to say that to a whole lot of people on a whole lot of subjects including this one. To some people they live in a world where 9/11 never happened, where shooting massacres like Sandy Hook were hoaxes and where terrible disorders such as DID don't exist. All I can say is what a lovely world they must live in and this author is obviously one of those delusional individuals living in that little paradise. Sorry, but DID is very real and to dispute it along with one of the greatest documented studies on it is ridiculous. This author wants to thrash Dr. Wilbur for using her patient for her own capital gains, exactly what is she doing with this piece of trash. Seriously, boy want to make a million dollars and sell a whole lot of books write something about one of the biggest well known best sellers of non-fiction ever produced.

Sybil Exposed by Debbie Nathan was so much more than I expected! Do you remember Sybil? You know, girl with 16 different personalities? You probably read about her in psychology class or maybe even have seen the Sally Fields movie? If you haven't read Sybil, I highly suggest you do so (I reviewed it recently!), and then I suggest you grab Sybil Exposed as a sequel. Just so you know, if you haven't checked out Sybil yet, you can still read this review because it's not going to give away Sybil spoilers. Debbie Nathan dives into research about one of the most famous cases of multiple personality: Sybil. She uncovers facts that show that the nonfictional story of Sybil is a fabrication. And while this might not seem like it would be interesting to all of you, it was very readable and high interest. Nathan delves into the pasts of the three main characters of Sybil: Sybil herself, Dr. Connie Wilbur the doctor, and Flora Rheta Schreiber the author. If you're a nonfiction/psychology buff, then this book should top your reading list. As a side note, I was reading Goodreads reviews about Sybil Exposed and came across this one from "Sybil's closest living relative." She tried to make Debbie Nathan sound like a liar, but Debbie was awesome: she shot back without insulting, and stuck to the facts. Seriously worth checking out the conversation. Have you read about this famous case of multiple personalities? What do you think? Thanks for reading, Rebecca @ Love at First Book

This book has been debunked by Mental Health Professionals specialized in Dissociative Disorders and Trauma. Debbie is NOT a mental health professional, nor a health professional. We recommend people read about False Memory Syndrome Foundation and their fall. It's exactly the same as reading this.

I read Sybil Exposed because I am a writer working on my own book about DID and wanted to hear all perspectives. This book was a grave disappointment. Although the author claims to be a journalist and the work is supposed to be a work of investigative journalism, it doesn't even come close. I had sincerely hoped that Ms. Nathan would have left her judgement, bias, and opinion behind when she started to write, but they scream out at us from every page. While her research appears to be extensive, I am left not really knowing whether she is credible or not because her own ideas and supposition stand in the way of what may (or may not# be the truth. This book did contribute to my own thoughts about the DID diagnosis, and about authors who write well-intentioned books. Real #and truly individual, not subject to criticism by someone who doesn't know what she's talking about) and not necesssarily all truth, fact, and objectivity.

Despite psychology debunking multiple personality years ago, it persists in the culture and hangs on in the discipline. This book can help guard against psychological and psycho-medical frauds of any kind. Hopefully Debbie Nathan will take on fibromyalgia next.

This book was thorough and well-researched, but ultimately suffers terribly because of author Debbie Nathan's laundry list of personal biases. Anti-semitism (such a references to Sybil author Flora Rheta Schreiber's "hooked nose"), racial othering, and politically incorrect language are rampant ("n*gger" makes a quoted appearance on the first page, and is followed by everything from "retarded" to "Indian" to "fairy" in the author's narration). Despite the book's purported feminist slant, there are many instances of sexism from the author—notably her repeated critiques of Schrieber's weight, psychiatrist Connie Wilbur's late-in-life plastic surgery, and both women's relationships with men. Most shockingly, despite the book's main topic of mental illness, Nathan is incredibly insensitive to the issue, frequently using derogatory, non-medical words like "crazy" and "lunatic" to describe the mentally ill and "normal" for those without mental illness. Overall, the book is informative about the history of Sybil, but lacks objectivity and is bogged down incredibly by the author's constant, offensive interjections about the people, events, and facts involved.

Debbie Nathan's book, "Sybil Exposed", is meticulously researched and documented, yet immensely readable. Not only is it a fascinating exploration of the lives of "Sybil", Connie Wilbur and Flora Schreiber, it is a history of a now-discredited cultural phenomenon: Multiple Personality Disorder. Debbie Nathan explodes the myth of Sybil's multiple personalities and childhood abuse by unearthing a multitude of facts which contradict the fantastical popular novel's narrative. We are given documented evidence of how Sybil's psychiatrist, Connie Wilbur, induced Sybil to act as if she had "alters", and how Wilbur willed into existence stories of Sybil's childhood "abuse". Please note, Debbie Nathan does this in a way that is sympathetic to these women. They, along with author Flora Schreiber, had emotional and societal reasons to act the way they did. I'm very impressed with Debbie Nathan's research. She has checked her facts thoroughly. Believers in MPD / Dissociative Identity Disorder and "Satanic Ritual Abuse" could learn a lot from this author's methodology, instead of accepting extraordinary claims at face value. I would recommend this book to students who could learn from the book's research methodology and readability. The book is also a page-turner and would appeal to anyone who likes good non-fiction.

I wish I'd read the reviews here first, and the list of sources many sources are totally unverifiable, such as the many 'author phone calls' she quotes plus work from other authors who have tried to discredit Sybil also - these are neither neutral not reliable sources - in fact almost every source she quotes has a strong bias against multiple personalities or against Sybil (usually both) I wish I'd read the description of the author before I started the book - I'd never heard of her but apparently discrediting satanic ritual abuse is her main topic of journalism so she's begun with a basis viewpoint. I found it pretty odd that so many people here could be taken in by this, but perhaps people believe what they want to believe rather than looking objectively at a topic?

Sybil became popular, both in psychiatry and modern culture in the 1970's. Both the book and the movie made the complex disorder known as "Multipersonality" a phenomenon, though sensationalizing it, as well. Not only did it bring this disorder to the spotlight in mental health, it created a catchphrase and controversy, in spite of its horrific nature. Psychiatry and psychology are not absolute, as the mind is a complex, hidden area. The memory is not always exact in time or place, being affected by many things. It deals with fact, feelings, and the shaded grey areas in between. The mind deals with the melding of both fact and feeling. Sometimes the mind remembers what the heart may have felt. History is recounted by what the mind remembers, sometimes losing things to interpretation, and sometimes colored by emotion, whether intentional or not. For many years, the story of Sybil, as well as the ethics and motivations of her therapist have been questioned. This book is written by investigative reporters whose goal is to shed light on the truth of Sybil's case, as well as the disorder. Letters and documentation were supplied by the family of Sybil to researchers of what is now known as "DID", Dissociative Identity Disorder. This disorder is still misunderstood and often misdiagnosed. The intent was to dispel myths, answering decades of questions and speculation. Notes at the end of this fascinating book list the documents used and the resources that Debbie Nathan was privy to, in her writing of "Sybil Exposed". I have no doubt that Sybil and her case will continue to be controversial, as will DID.

The story is extraordinary and the writing is exquisite. Be ready when you start reading this book to stay up all night because you will not be able to put it down.

This is essentially a good book. I am the daughter of a psychiatrist and as such have been familiar with "unusual" disorders. I found the basic fact-sharing part of the book very interesting. The bad news is that this book desperately needed to be spellchecked and edited by a real person, not a computer. There are several areas where a completely incorrect word is used, as sometimes happens when spellcheck isn't monitored. This ends up damaging the credibility of the book and its subject.

If this book is true to the facts and Sybil did make all this up it is an amazing talent she had. But I do think some of this may be a way to make a buck off the young woman. I read the book when it came out and did see the movie many times. This book is nothing like I had expected. I thought each of the personalities would be explained . I was wrong.. I was disappointed a little but the book is ok.

I bought this book Fri evening and finished it Sat night. I could not put it down, its quite possibly one of the most fascinating psychological reads I have seen in years. It all made sense and seemed to me like the "perfect storm" of people came together and created one of the biggest hysteria's in recent times. Then to find out that Shirley Mason (Sybil) was quite possibly perfectly sane, but suffered from pernicious anemia was riveting. I think the saddest thing about all this is that Shirley Mason's mother, Mattie Mason is the real victim in all this. This woman probably never harmed her daughter at all. Sadly she will go down in history as an sexually abusive monster. I only wish Connie Wilbur was alive today to see the harm her "treatments" did. But in her defense, the era she came out of knew little about psychological treatment and mental illness. I really don't understand the negative reviews this book has gotten either. It was well written and well researched, furthermore IT MADE SENSE. Everything fit together. A few questions I am curious about were whether Shirley Mason or Connie Wilbur were actually lesbians. Also the drug use of Shirley Mason, did she continue using addictive psychotropic drugs (supplied by Wilbur) throughout her life? Anyone that has any interest in psychology or practices in the field NEEDS to read this book.

This book was written before Shirley Mason's letters to a student, Nancy Preston, were released and well before Preston wrote a book about it in 2016: [...]. Her supposed true history of D.I.D. was revealed as part of this, and Mason did, in fact, claim that the original book was entirely true. Nathan's book that supposedly exposes Sybil as a lie, is mostly based on non-scientific claims written non a non-psychologist. Since the publication of Preston's book, many have revised their understanding of the case. Mason did at one time claim that it was all a lie, but this was likely to prevent the public from hounding her once it became public that Mason was, in fact, the Sybil depicted in the book. Don't take this book as fact without reading the other accounts. It seems that Shirley Mason truly did have D.I.D.

I couldn't put this book down once I started reading it. I did read Sybil as a high school student and was horrified by the allegedly true story of Sybil. After reading Exposing Sybil, I have found myself differently horrified for the patient at the center of this book. I can only imagine the life that Shirley could've lived had she gotten ethically applied attention and care. Wilbur and Schreiber are depicted as driven women with tons of ambition, and it just seems that they took a very unfortunate road towards recognition, at the cost of Shirley's health.