Sybil Exposed (37 page)

Within a few years, thousand of adults would be investigated nationwide for crimes against the little children. Some 130 would be charged. Oddly, authorities would find no evidence. Some of the children said they had been raped with knives and gun barrels, but they never had corresponding wounds. Nor had any parents or other adults walked into these nursery schools unannounced and witnessed the abuse. Children talked of seeing their classmates assaulted, but the classmates didn’t remember being hung upside down, having objects inserted in them, or being forced to chant to the Devil.

Experts came to the defendants’ trials to tell the juries why so many of these children had at first denied they’d been tortured. They needed psychotherapy and repeated interrogation in order to disclose the abuse, the experts said, for the same reason that Sybil had needed her psychoanalyst for so long. Just as Sybil had been bizarrely violated as a little girl and forgot the assaults because of psychic splitting, children nowadays were being attacked, and they were protecting themselves by dissociating, or “losing time.” When a child said abuse hadn’t happened, the experts insisted, that was proof that it
had
happened. The “victims” were given various treatments,
including drugs and hypnosis. Dozens of adults were convicted. Some got centuries of hard time.
22

By the time of the ISSMP&D’s annual conference in 1987, speakers were lecturing about “Treatment of Victims of Ritualistic Abuse” and “The Satanic Cult in Rural Mid-America.” The ISSMP&D’s big new idea, that cults were breaking children’s minds into pieces, was invoked by people who had joined Connie in founding the organization and the multiple personality movement. More than six hundred therapists were attending ISSMP&D conferences to learn how to ferret ritual abuse memories from their patients.
23

That same year—1987—the
DSM
appended “disorder” to “multiple personality,” creating the popular acronym MPD. The 1980
DSM
had characterized the illness as “extremely rare” and possibly caused by child abuse. The new one described it as “not nearly so rare as it has commonly been thought to be,” and caused “in nearly all cases” by child abuse, often sexual. Furthermore, older requirements that alter personalities be “complex,” “integrated,”
24
and mutually amnesiac for each other were dropped. Now, mere fragments of behavior, little tics that popped up for a few seconds and of which the patient was fully aware, qualified as alter personalities.

It became common for MPD sufferers to possess scores, even hundreds, of alters (one was reputed to have 4,500). Not all were human; some weren’t even alive. Patients reported gorillas and lobsters, as well as unicorns, angels, and—if the alters were immobile and voiceless—trees. Supernatural-sounding claims sprang up. A person with MPD, it was said, could have one alter with blue eyes and another with brown eyes. Such a person could be diabetic but have a personality whose insulin levels were normal. Even blood types could change.

The media was all over these “facts.”
25
Breathlessly, they repeated ISSMP&D speculations about MPD as a late-twentieth-century epidemic. Before
Sybil
, fewer than a hundred people over the past two centuries had been identified in Western medical literature with conditions resembling MPD. By 1984, only four years after the condition was first listed in the
DSM,
an ISSMP&D leader was suggesting that 25,000 Americans suffered from it. Another leader estimated that 3 percent of the population had MPD—over seven million people.
26

Therapists flocked to the field, and specialized wards opened, including
at Chicago’s prestigious Rush-Presbyterian St. Luke’s Hospital. These facilities were far more reputable than Connie’s Open Hospital had been. But they used the same irregular treatments that she had: massive doses of mind-bending drugs, including barbiturates injected into veins.

Looking at the new statistics, the new wards, and the influx of therapists eager to specialize in MPD, Connie felt vindicated. Years ago, her father had called her stupid. Now she’d been recognized by the APA as a Distinguished Psychiatrist. Colleagues celebrated her for launching “a scientific revolution.”
27
Sybil
, one of them wrote, was “the most important book about a psychiatrist and patient ever written.”
28
Dr. Cornelia B. Wilbur was one of the greatest physicians in America, if not the world.

At the same time Connie was receiving these accolades, Shirley got sick again. No medical records are available to reveal what her symptoms were, but when interviewed for this book, some of Connie’s old colleagues in Lexington remembered hearing in the 1980s that Shirley—who most of them knew was Sybil—had entered the hospital for nonpsychiatric reasons. In 1989, at a meeting of the ISSMP&D, Connie gave a speech about her years of work identifying and treating multiple personality disorder, and her persistence even when her efforts at first were ignored. “I was raised as a pure scientist,” she boasted to her audience. “I have never forgotten that if you’re going to make a decision, you get as much evidence as you possibly can.”
29
That is how the correct diagnosis was arrived at, she explained, no matter how many people might dispute it.

After her presentation a Q & A followed, and someone asked how Sybil was doing. Connie’s answer was brief, almost throwaway. Sybil had lived for a long time without much energy, she said, because in addition to everything else that was wrong with her, she had suffered for years from a disease called pernicious anemia.

Another audience member followed with an unrelated question, and that was the end of pernicious anemia and Sybil. No one stopped to think about the bombshell Connie had just revealed.

But this was a group of psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers, not internal medicine specialists. Few knew that pernicious anemia is a genetic disease, handed down from parent to child. Probably even fewer were aware that although the symptoms of pernicious anemia most commonly appear during middle age, they occasionally begin during early childhood
or adolescence. As for Connie, she probably would not have told her audience about Shirley’s pernicious anemia if she’d known that its symptoms run the gamut: from tingling and numbness in the limbs to stomach pains, fatigue, constipation, difficulty concentrating or learning, depression, social withdrawal, anxiety, irritability, headaches, insomnia, mood swings, rapid heart beat, nausea, vomiting, severe weight loss, hallucinations, muscle pains, a tendency to walk into walls, confusion about identity—and miscarriages, deadly stomach cancer, and hair gone prematurely white.
30

The gamut encompasses Shirley’s lifelong problems, and those of her mother, Mattie Mason, who no doubt passed the disease to her daughter.

When Shirley was a child, physicians such as Dr. Flores, her family practitioner, had the knowledge and technology to detect anemia by using blood tests. But doctors back then did not know that the blood of a person suffering from pernicious anemia can appear abnormal one day and normal the next, but either way it makes no difference: the disease is still there.

Not until 1948 did medical researchers discover the real cause of pernicious anemia: an inborn lack of ability in some people to process vitamin B12, which is essential for human health and life. The injections of hog liver that Shirley was prescribed as a blood thickener made her better when she was young because they happened to contain vitamin B12, though doctors didn’t know that at the time. She stopped receiving the shots because the doctors mistakenly thought that when her blood looked normal, she was no longer ill.

But when her symptoms eventually returned, the doctors scrambled for an explanation. Hysteria, they decided, and Shirley and her parents had no choice but to accept the diagnosis, to embrace it, to coddle it. Soon Shirley would not know the difference between the bad feelings in her mind and the malfunctions in her body. All would combine, into a performance that eventually would became one of the most dramatic productions in the world, with help from Dr. Cornelia Wilbur and her “pure science.”

How did Connie feel when she discovered she’d spent so much time unaware that Shirley suffered from pernicious anemia? Did she understand that a correct diagnosis might have saved her patient from years of drug addiction? From therapy so frequent that she became disabled during what should have been the most productive time of her life? Did Connie realize that she had pressured Shirley into blaming her symptoms on a past
so riddled with fiction that it hardly qualified anymore as a meaningful life history?

There is no way to know how Shirley felt. Maybe none of it mattered anymore, especially after she developed yet another serious illness. In 1990 she was diagnosed with breast cancer and put through excruciating hospital procedures to destroy the tumors. Connie was her doctor again, arranging treatments, consulting with oncologists, comforting Shirley like a mother.
31

Two years later the roles were reversed for the first time. Old age caught up with Connie after she turned eighty, and she had a stroke. She could no longer get out of a chair, and Shirley managed the household and hired nurses to help. Connie softened, becoming dependent and childlike. Sometimes her caretakers would gather her up and drive her to the beauty parlor. She returned with her shiny red nails and carrot hair, but getting to the beauty salon eventually became impossible.

On a Thursday in April 1992, Connie, who was eighty-three, suffered a fatal heart attack. Devastated but with a sense of duty, Shirley went downtown to the funeral home to provide the necessary data for the death certificate—date and place of birth, father’s name, mother’s before she was married.
32
There was a memorial service at the university, and the national press reported the passing of one of America’s most famous psychiatrists. The ISSMP&D hailed Dr. Cornelia Wilbur as the person most “responsible for the current high level of interest in multiple personality disorder.” Every clinician treating MPD was indebted to her. None could approach their work “without in some way being influenced by Connie.”
33

Connie’s will designated her former patient Jan Morrow, who had swum laps with her every weekend in exchange for therapy, as executor.
34
The estate included her house, which was slated to be sold after everything inside was disposed of. Morrow came over to start the job and found Shirley still there, rooting compulsively through Connie’s papers—papers that included thousands of pages of Shirley’s own therapy records.
35

Morrow boxed up the papers and took them to her own house, where she read them and concluded that they were not for the public to see. Over the next several days, she tore the records of America’s most celebrated psychiatrist into jagged little strips, and stuffed them into bags. Then she took the bags outside and tossed them in the garbage.
36

T
HE WAY THINGS WERE EVOLVING
in the world of multiple personality disorder treatment, Connie was fortunate not to have lived past 1992. MPD was still at its apex then, a diagnosis so reputable and alluring that it had become part of the wallpaper of American culture. “This could be someone you know,” proclaimed Sally Jesse Raphael as she paraded multiples on her talk show, with their stories of childhood torture. “MPD: The Syndrome of the ’90s,” Oprah called one of her programs.
1

Oprah was right. By 1992 thousands of people, in every sizeable community in the United States and Canada, were in treatment for MPD. Bookstores sold memoirs by multiples:
The Flock
;
When Rabbit Howls; Ghost Girl
were a few titles. There were magazines, like
Many Voices
, to which multiples could contribute poems and artwork. A few courts even started allowing alter personalities to give testimony in criminal trials. In one such case, a young man was charged with raping a woman who he said agreed to have sex with him—the woman, however, argued that it was her child alter who went to bed with the man, and he should have realized she was incapable of consent. The judge swore in six of the woman’s multiple personalities as witnesses. The man was convicted.
2

There were entertainment stars who said they were multiples. Roseanne Barr appeared on talk shows to say that she had been sexually molested as a child but forgot about it until she entered therapy in her late thirties. She would later describe her twenty alter personalities. They included “Piggy,” “Bambi,” and “Fucker.”
3

Barr characterized having alters as an illness, but celebrity feminist Gloria Steinem published an inspirational book for women,
Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem
, which lauded multiple personalities as a gift. MPD women, Steinem wrote, could learn many foreign languages. Not only that, they could “have two or even three menstrual cycles in the same body.”
4
In her acknowledgments Steinem thanked Bennett Braun, a leader of the International Society for the Study of Multiple Personality and Dissociation (ISSMP&D), for his help.

In reality, however, the disorder was becoming half Trojan Horse and half time bomb. Critics sensed that the diagnosis was about to self-destruct, along with the therapists who promoted it. The FBI since the early 1980s had been investigating the claims patients were making about ritual abuse at the hands of Satanic cults and had never found any evidence for the existence of the cults themselves. Many psychiatrists and psychologists also knew that witch hunts had wrought terrible suffering on innocent people during the Middle Ages. Some of the calmer ISSMP&D people called in an anthropologist, Dr. Sherrill Mulhern, and asked her what was going on. In analytic detail, Mulhern warned that these therapists’ ignorance about patients’ suggestibility, combined with their naivete about “recovered memories,” had opened a Pandora’s box, releasing from the collective psyche some of Western culture’s most irrational (and dangerous) fears.
5