I've now read the book and was pretty impressed with it. The author's tone is very angry, so angry in fact that I was worried that she was anti-psychiatry in principal. However, she is a reliable journalist with a good track record. She's just so angry about this horrible story.
She tracks the histories of all three of the players, "Sybil" or Shirley Mason, Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, and Flora Rheta Schreiber, who wrote the original book.
There are a number of very sad situations in the book, but to me the saddest is that Mason's symptoms when she started match those of
pernicious anemia. Indeed, when treated with hogs liver shots, a common treatment for anemia at the time, she got better. If she had continued with treatment for that condition, while still quite young, chances are she could have had a normal life.
What is really infuriating is that Schreiber and Wilbur had no compunction at all about lying. Sybil's mother was not diagnosed as a schizophrenic at the Mayo clinic, as is clearly stated in the book. Indeed, the slanders against "Mrs. Dorsett" are extreme. There is no evidence of the horrifying sexual and physical abuse depicted in the book.
Mason eventually became so dependent on Wilbur that she was creating new personalities to keep the relationship going. With a good psychiatrist, she could have been weaned off the treatment and the drugs Wilbur was filling her with, and been given a chance at life. Wilbur, instead, cashed in on her "favorite" patient.
Finally, the sad ending to this sad tale is that just as Mason was starting to lead a normal life, working as a teacher and art therapist, living in her own apartment in Kentucky, and developing friends and relationships, the book was published and cut her off from the world. She was forced by Wilbur and Schreiber to abandon her friends, even childhood friends, for fear they would out her as Sybil. She became depressed and unable to live independently, finally in effect living with Wilbur until Wilbur's death.
What really became a
folie a deux was treated as reality, cashed in on by two publicity and money hungry women, and thwarted any chance of normality for a frail and very sad woman.
