Dissociative Identity Disorder: does it really exist?

Here's the linked article, which is paywalled:

Turning 50 is rarely easy for a woman, and “Sybil” is no exception.

This tarnished classic — “the True and Extraordinary Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Separate Personalities,” to invoke the most carnival-barker of its various subtitles — has since its 1973 publication been critically dismissed; wedged on the best-seller list between Lillian Hellman and Howard Cosell as if at some nightmare dinner party; made into two different television movies; workshopped as a musical; cited in psychiatric literature; debunked, dissected and defended.

Widely reported to have sold over six million copies, she’s valiantly stayed in circulation all these years, but can’t be blamed for looking a little frayed around the edges.

“Sybil” is part of a long American parade of books about psychologically distressed women, preceded in the 1960s by “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden” and “The Bell Jar,” followed in the 1990s — the cloak coming off — by the confessionals “Girl, Interrupted” and “Prozac Nation.” It haunted teenage girls (and surely some boys) from their bedroom shelves, with its distinctive covers of a face divided as if the shards of a broken mirror, or fractured into jigsaw-puzzle pieces.

I, too, was intrigued by that mirror cover, but thoroughly perplexed by the text. Returning to it as an adult, I can only see “Sybil” weighed down with all the scholarship and skepticism that came to surround her, like clanking, oversize accessories. The book is a historical curiosity and a cautionary tale of mass cultural delusion that makes one wonder what current voguish diagnoses — witness the “TikTok tics” — might warrant closer interrogation. (cont.)

(cont.) Seemingly overnight, “Sybil” pathologized the idea that one might “contain multitudes,” as Walt Whitman wrote in his exuberant “Song of Myself.” Its heroine had suffered extreme childhood trauma and developed a set of different personalities to cope. With the help of an attentive doctor, she would integrate them into one identity and be made whole and mature.

It was a remarkable story — and at this moment of Women’s Lib and changing gender roles, an oddly relatable one: somehow of a piece with “The Exorcist,” released the same year, and that bonkers Enjoli perfume commercial with a spokesmodel bringing home the bacon, frying it up in a pan and never letting you forget you were a man.

Originally titled “Who is Sylvia?” (the publisher deemed that name too Jewish), “Sybil” was written by Flora Rheta Schreiber in close collaboration with its subject, an artist and teacher who in real life was Shirley Ardell Mason from Dodge Center, Minn., and Mason’s longtime psychoanalyst, Cornelia Wilbur. What did the three women have in common? Magazines: the same bibles of domestic servitude that Betty Friedan so effectively scrutinized in “The Feminine Mystique.”

Forbidden to create fiction by her parents, who were strict Seventh-day Adventists, Mason as a child instead cut out and rearranged letters and words from copies of Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping, “like a kidnapper preparing a ransom note,” wrote Debbie Nathan in “Sybil Exposed,” her forensic 2011 investigation of the trio, which draws extensively from Schreiber’s papers at John Jay College.

Schreiber, who aspired to a literary career and at one time was romantically involved with the playwright Eugene O’Neill’s oldest son, wrote celebrity profiles and pop psychology pieces for outlets such as Cosmopolitan. And Wilbur, who had treated the actor Roddy McDowall — Case 129 in a book she co-authored about the causes and “treatment” of male homosexuality — craved the kind of broad audience that magazines then attracted.

Written to women’s magazines’ then-loose reporting standards, with pseudonyms granted and facts changed or completely fabricated, “Sybil” is best read less as a case study in the mode of “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” (the even more famous and interrogated Dora) than as horror story. And indeed Schreiber, admiring the success of Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” from the beginning aspired to do a “nonfiction novel.” (cont.)

(cont.) Its shocking details of abuse at the hands of a likely schizophrenic mother — cold-water enemas administered while the young “Sybil Dorsett” is hanging upside down from a light bulb cord over the kitchen table are one “matinal maternal ministration,” to use Schreiber’s affected terminology — exceed those in Stephen King’s novel “Carrie.” Sybil supposedly had a bead shoved up her nose; a buttonhook inserted in her genitals; and was blindfolded and shut in a trunk.

Rather than telekinetic powers, she develops a preternatural ability to assume different personas. Struggling in work and love, she finds herself dissociating from reality, “losing time.” At one session she begins speaking with a countrified accent and identifies herself as “Peggy.” The number and variety of these different characters — which include two male carpenters, “Mike” and “Sid” — increase exponentially into an “entourage of alternating selves.”

The real case studies here are of medical and journalistic malpractice. Wilbur by any modern metric crossed the line from transference to enmeshment. She crept into her patient’s bed to administer electroshock treatment with an outdated device, doled out Pentothal (a barbiturate then wrongly thought to act as a truth serum) to the point of addiction, and took her on creepy road trips.

Presented with a rueful letter from Mason that she’d been “essentially lying” about not only the different selves but her mother’s tortures, Wilbur refused to reconsider her diagnosis, Nathan reported. Her patient was in a state of “resistance” to the terrible truth, the psychiatrist maintained.

When Schreiber tried to play Capote, visiting Dodge Center and examining Mason’s medical records, she found discrepancies galore. But all three women were too emotionally and economically invested in the project to abandon it, even forming a company called Sybil Inc.

The notion of multiple personalities has remained big business. During its brief tenure in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders from 1980 to 1994, cases mushroomed among the female populace, along with a fever of recovered memories stoked by another since discredited book, “Michelle Remembers.” Perhaps never before or since has the medical profession been so entwined with story. What could be more dramatic, more compelling, than a protagonist and numerous supporting players in one body? (The manual now describes the condition less suggestively, as dissociative identity disorder.)

Hollywood had already harvested “The Three Faces of Eve,” a best seller about the case of Christine Costner Sizemore; the film won Joanne Woodward an Oscar in 1958. (Woodward would play Wilbur in the first TV movie of “Sybil.”) The multiple-personality phenomenon became a mainstay of talk shows, from Schreiber and Wilbur appearing on Dick Cavett’s to Oprah Winfrey declaring it “the syndrome of the ’90s.” One of her guests, Truddi Chase, identified 92 separate personalities, which Chase called The Troops.

Memoirs of the condition, including Chase’s best-selling “When Rabbit Howls,” abounded. Friends of the real-life “Sybil” arrived with sequels, showcasing her paintings. Further cinematic depictions ranged from the sublime (Edward Norton in “Primal Fear”) to the ridiculous (Jim Carrey in “Me, Myself & Irene”). (cont.)

(cont.) Few remember Michelle, but Sybil, with all her cautionary addenda, endures. Further footnoting the whole saga, her psychiatrist also figured in the case of Billy Milligan, the acquitted “Campus Rapist” said to have 24 personalities, whose story was told by the author Daniel Keyes.

“The Crowded Room,” a 10-episode mini-series inspired by Milligan, will begin streaming on Apple TV+ next month. The sands of mental health may always be shifting, but when mined for material, they’re bottomless.

Ask any gay Republican.

I remember reading the book when I was around 14 and finding it fascinating. Kind of disappointed to learn it was probably fake. My favourite personality was the smooth sophisticated Vicky.

I did some temp work at a psychiatric hospital pharmacy and I had a patient who had DID as a diagnosis. I asked another employee "is that real"? She said it was, but that DID is not like you see on tv. (I'm guessing she meant - having lots of personalities). And that this particular person would regress to a younger age.

Yes, it does. This is a good (but not easy) introduction to the subject

I think little kids who get sexually molested by a household member might develop a 2nd ID as a coping mechanism. If you can completely block out a traumatic memory (as a coping mechanism), then I think you can develop a different personality to cope, as well.

Dissociative Identity Disorder is real.

There's now millions of research dollars going into neuroimaging for dissociative identity disorder, because severe dissociation changes brain structure and morphology to such an extent that it can be diagnosed through MRI. I've added a link to a recent review below. The psychiatry hospital attached the Harvard Medical School is now the main engine of DID biomarker research.

The typical DID presentation is very subtle and you won't know if someone has DID. It's not like the movies. Debates about Sybil or books from fifty years ago are irrelevant. A lot changes in half a century.

No, it doesn’t.

End of discussion.

Andthepeople; andthepeople; andthepeople…

Herschel Walker claimed to have been diagnosed with DID in 2001. And yet he still ran for US senator and almost won.

[quote] In filing for divorce in December 2001, [his former wife Cindy] Grossman accused him of "physically abusive and extremely threatening behavior." After the divorce, she told the media that, during their marriage, Walker pointed a pistol at her head and said: "I'm going to blow your f'ing brains out." She also said he had used knives to threaten her.In 2005, a restraining order was imposed on Walker regarding Grossman, after Grossman's sister stated in an affidavit that Walker told her "unequivocally that he was going to shoot my sister Cindy and her [new] boyfriend in the head." As a result, a temporary gun-owning ban was also issued to Walker by a judge.Walker stated that he does not remember the assault or the threats and attributed his aberrant behavior with his wife and others to his dissociative identity disorder for which he was diagnosed in 2001.

What does the subtle, today version look like?

^^^ Like this:

Lol R13 "end of discussion"? You googled and found an article from 12 years ago on a random website by Clifford Lazarus, "co-founder of The Lazarus Institute" where he promotes a form of quack therapy "originated by his late father, Professor Arnold Lazarus". Thank goodness we have your critical insights and research skills to enrich this discussion.

Yeah, I appreciate links, but who the fuck is that guy - to say that’s the definitive last word on the subject.

They think Scott Peterson has a dissociative disorder. Not multiple people, more like not really being anchored in his body , can remove himself from reality

Nepo baby Clifford N. Lazarus Ph.D., and his 2011 definitive word on the topic, can fuck off

The lady at OP's link desperately requires a paper bag for her face.

I knew a woman back in the day who was diagnosed as having 21 personalities. I mentioned her on another thread on DL not too long ago. Never saw any evidence of different personas but at times of stress or emotional upset she would disassociate in a way I have never heard described anywhere. Her speech would slow and her voice would thicken (for lack of a better word). She sounded like she was sedated. She’d sound kind of cotton mouthed and she would pause… between every couple of words… as if it was hard… to gather her thoughts.

At first I had no idea what the hell was going on. I would ask if she had taken some tranquilizers or had been drinking and she always said ‘no.’ Then we were talking on the phone one day and she was telling me about a recent falling out she had with a friend. The former friend had been unnecessarily harsh for no real reason and while we were in the midst of talking she just switched over. I literally said, Barbra come back. This girl isn’t worth getting so upset about. She’s an asshole and it’s not about you at all. That seemed to make her feel better (and it was true) and she was able to come back (so to speak).

The whole thing made me feel awful for her. She was a very sweet woman. Part of the downtown art scene before her mental health deteriorated. She needed real help and instead she had some idiot therapist who was infected with the multiple personality hysteria of the 90’s. Even back then I was skeptical. There were a couple of times that she acted out of character I suppose, but it was not like she became a different person. I just never really knew what to think about it all.

You often hear people who were repeatedly sexually and/or violently abused as children, and who could not escape because of their age, or because they told adults who didn't believe them, say they ended up dissociating. They mean it in the sense of looking at the event as if from outside it while it's happening, as a way to survive. That doesn't necessarily mean that they become someone else or lose weeks of time, but they do go somewhere mentally that is not the usual mind-in-body experience we all live with. I'm totally convinced that happens.

Whether there is any truth to the idea of the person with several personalities all with names, only a qualified shrink could tell us.

If there is a qualified shrink.

I really don't think so. I think it's a BS diagnosis and the mental health version of fibromyalgia. A catch all for "mysterious" symptoms that come and go in problematic people.

I have a disassociative disorder - NOT D.I.D. I was so offended when one of my psychiatrists was asking me (years ago) 'do you ever feel like you see something out of the corner of your eye and nothing is there?' and 'do the things you see sometimes seem like they're in shadows?'. I just laughed and said I don't have multiple personalities.

I can just completely shut off. Feel nothing, react in no manner, go away. my heartbeat is calm, my breathing is calm. I just shut off under certain kinds of circumstances. I think that's fairly common and some people take it a few steps further. I don't have an opinion whether they do that intentionally or not.

People in Dodge Center, Minnesota who watched the movie Sybil knew it was about Shirley Mason. They remembered Mattie Mason's bizarre behavior so that part was accurate.

R27 that is catatonic.

Dissociative identity disorder is the most severe form of dissociation. If you don't think DID exists, then you don't think dissociation exists, except that dissociation does exist. When you measure dissociation using validated instruments, the most dissociated people have DID.

"Multiple personalities" is a misnomer. We all have psychological sub-systems but in most people they are integrated. People with DID grew up in hostile environments and there is a failure of psychological integration in infancy and childhood. Their brain structures are different which is why you can diagnose DID with a high level of accuracy on a brain scan.

Yes, there are annoying teenagers on TikTok diagnosing themselves with DID, and clinicians have always recognised the problem of malingering and factitious DID presentations.

[quote] If you don't think DID exists, then you don't think dissociation exists, except that dissociation does exist.

That is completely illogical.

You can absolutely believe dissociation can exist and yet not believe that DID exists.

^^Can you eat my ass while I eat a p&b sandwich?

Sybil was Sally's greatest performance.

[quote]I was so offended when one of my psychiatrists was asking me (years ago) 'do you ever feel like you see something out of the corner of your eye and nothing is there?' and 'do the things you see sometimes seem like they're in shadows?'. I just laughed and said I don't have multiple personalities.

rescue-chick, that's literally how you screen for psychosis. I doubt very seriously that he or she thought you were psychotic, but going through a review of systems is part of a psychiatric interview.

Sheesh.