Of Interest: Another Fictitous Piece of Nonfiction

This time, we're talking about a best seller from the 1970's: Sybil, by Flora Rheta Screiber. Turns out that this highly influential volume isn't marred by a few fact-checking problems. Rather, the entire work is being exposed as fabricated and false--invented purely for book sales:

Sally Field's 'Sybil' was a lie: Best-selling child abuse and split personality author exposed as a fake

Victim? Shirley Mason, who was revealed to be the basis for Sybil, said in a 1958 letter that she was lying

It was a best-selling 'true story' that planted the notion of repressed memory syndrome in the American consciousness.
The shocking account of Sybil, a girl with 16 separate personalities that developed as a result of horrendous childhood abuses, sold seven million copies, and even spawned a recognised syndrome, 'multiple personality disorder. 
The 1973 book told the story of Sybil Dorsett, later revealed to be Shirley Mason, whose personality had been splintered into more than a dozen distinct characters including a baby and two males.
But the titillating tale, serialised across the nation, has now been exposed as a fake, concocted by three women as a calculated money-making invention
A new book 'Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case' denounces the account as a fiction.
According to the author, Debbie Nathan, the memoir was cooked up by three individuals hungry for fame and fortune: Mason, her therapist Cornelia (Connie) Wilbur and journalist Flora Schreiber.

Read the rest here. 


As strange as it sounds, growing up this book was a hot button topic in my household. My parents, both forensic psychologists, were often called into court cases dealing with individuals claiming a so-called multiple personality disorder-- an "illness" they both found to be manufactured and improbable. In many ways, the multiple personality disorder phenomenon that has occurred in the mainstream was tripped off by this book, which claimed to be evidence of the existence and contributory causes of MPD. Following Sybil's popularity, reports of MPD skyrocketed, going from nonexistent to virtually commonplace. While many in the psychological/psychiatric community contested its authenticity, there were others that jumped on the bandwagon. It sickens me to think that the lies propagated in this book contributed to an entire generation of mislead, regressive strides in mental health. Of course, it would be naive to assume that this book is the only contributing factor to the emergence of a largely manufactured or mislabeled disorder (the mental health community themselves must take a good deal of credit) but the exposure of its fallacies is certainly an example of the far-reaching impacts of fiction marketed as fact.