Sybil Exposed
 Sybil is a patient who had been diagnosed suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder(DID) or Multiple Personality Disorder.This is the true account of a woman named Sybil-so named to protect her privacy-her real name is Shirley Ardell Mason (1923-1998) – who as a result of terrible childhood abuse and sufferings developed 16 alternate personalities to cope up with her anguishes and fears. She has occasional ‘blackouts’ and is unable to tell what happened to her in those blackouts. Sometimes she finds herself in strange places with no idea of how she got there. Somehow, Sybil Exposed!
What diagnosis did she actually have? A personal journal documenting her multiple personality “time lapses” before she came to therapy turned out to be a fake. And most damningly, Sybil herself wrote a letter confessing that she had been lying in therapy – only to have |
her therapist tell her that she was “fighting” the truth.
But there was no question that Shirley (Sybil) was a troubled young woman. She was constantly exhausted. She felt estranged from herself. The author of the 2011 book Sybil Exposed, Debbie Nathan, makes a case for many of Shirley’s troubles coming from congenital pernicious anemia. This condition stems from an inability to absorb vitamin B12, leading to a lifelong deficiency. There’s evidence that Sybil’s mother had it, since she had two characteristic symptoms: prematurely white hair and early-onset stomach cancer. Her mother was also nervous and often exhausted, just like Shirley was. Other symptoms of this type of anemia fall more in line with the kind of symptoms that could be mistaken for multiple personality. They experience confusion, disorientation, and estrangement from their own bodies. This mental confusion can become permanent if treatment is delayed. Dang! I’ve read the book of Sybil more than a decade ago, and all I had been read was just a fake story of one with 16 personalities. That was a great lie story of one who suffered DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder), even she had fooled her own therapist. |
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