The Multiple Personality Industry: Psychiatry’s Dress Rehearsal for the Autism Epidemic
We already know this story. Why are we pretending we don’t?
This is part of an ongoing series. Previously: “Move Over, AI – The Real Boom Industry Is Autism”
The Bomb That Started It
In 1973, a book called Sybil detonated across American culture. It told the “true story” of a woman with sixteen distinct personalities, each with its own name, voice, and history. The 1976 TV movie starring Sally Field turned it into a national obsession.
The message was clear: hidden trauma was everywhere, and fractured minds were the proof.
What the public didn’t know—what wouldn’t emerge for decades—is that Sybil wasn’t documenting a disorder. It was inventing one.
What the Archives Revealed
The real Sybil was Shirley Mason, an anxious art teacher from Minnesota. After her death, the archives opened. What they revealed was troubling.
Mason herself wrote a detailed confession letter to her therapist admitting she had made up the multiple personalities. She described exactly how she’d created the illusion. Her therapist, Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, dismissed the confession as “resistance” and continued treatment.
Audiotapes examined by psychiatrist Herbert Spiegel and psychologist Robert Rieber revealed that Wilbur had suggested the personalities to Mason—essentially coaching her on what symptoms to produce. Both concluded that the case was not what it claimed to be.
Journalist Debbie Nathan, who examined the complete Sybil archive after it became available, described the story as “an elaborate fraud—albeit one that the perpetrators may have half-believed.”
Even Simone Reinders, a neuroscientist who believes dissociative disorders are real, concedes that Sybil specifically was “manufactured through hypnosis, pentothal, and a close involvement between subject and therapist.”
The founding case of the MPD epidemic was, by any reasonable standard, not a naturally occurring example of the disorder it was supposed to prove.
Sybil, Inc.
The three women—patient, psychiatrist, author—formed a company to split the profits. They called it “Sybil, Inc.”
The book deal was negotiated while Mason was still in treatment. The business came before the cure.
The Disorder That Therapy Created
Here’s what many psychiatric historians now argue: Multiple Personality Disorder, as it was diagnosed in the Sybil era, was not discovered by therapy—it was largely created by it. Vulnerable patients were taught to perform a role by clinicians who rewarded the performance, often without either party fully realizing what was happening.
Before Sybil provided the script, almost nobody had these symptoms because nobody knew what symptoms to have. After Sybil, thousands of patients produced exactly what the book described.
Psychiatrists August Piper and Harold Merskey, in a peer-reviewed two-part paper titled “The Persistence of Folly,” concluded: “There is no proof for the claim that DID results from childhood trauma and the condition cannot be reliably diagnosed. It is best understood as a culture-bound and often iatrogenic condition.”
Iatrogenic. Caused by treatment itself.
At Johns Hopkins, psychiatrist Paul McHugh took a different approach: he told his staff to simply ignore the “alters” and treat whatever underlying condition the patient actually had. The result? The multiple personalities “tend to fall away quickly when ignored.” Patients who arrived displaying elaborate switching behavior stopped within days.
That’s not a disease. That’s a performance waiting for an audience.
The Gold Rush
But before the collapse came the boom.
In the entire history of Western civilization prior to Sybil, fewer than 200 cases of multiple personality had ever been documented. The condition was so rare most clinicians would never see one.
Then the book hit.
Within a decade, clinics that had never seen MPD were reporting dozens of cases. Major hospitals opened entire MPD wards. Therapists advertised specialty practices.
By the mid-1980s, researchers were citing more than 6,000 documented cases—a thirtyfold increase over the entire previous century. By the early 1990s, clinicians were claiming tens of thousands of cases in North America.
Individual programs were suddenly treating hundreds of MPD patients. Some patients were catalogued with 40, 80, even 200 separate personalities. Where early cases rarely showed more than two or three “alters,” the average climbed to thirteen.
The Collapse
By the mid-1990s, the whole edifice crumbled.
Investigations exposed the suggestive therapeutic practices. Former patients sued their therapists for iatrogenic harm—for creating the very condition they claimed to treat. The Sybil archives revealed the founding case was built on questionable ground.
The results were immediate:
MPD diagnoses plummeted
Hospital programs closed
The dramatic “switching” that therapists had documented simply stopped appearing
The diagnosis was officially retired in 1994, replaced with “Dissociative Identity Disorder”—a name change designed partly to escape the discredited MPD brand
Sybil’s Cure?
The treatment lasted eleven years. Thousands of sessions. Hypnosis. Sodium pentothal injections. The goal was to map every “alter,” name them, coax them out, and eventually integrate them into one whole person.
During treatment, she became addicted to barbiturates—from 1955 to 1959. Debbie Nathan described the relationship as “like a junkie to her pusher.”
In 1965, Mason was declared cured.
For a few years, she taught art and lived on her own.
Wilbur took a position at the University of Kentucky.
Then the book came out. People recognized her. She moved to Lexington, Kentucky, to be near Wilbur. She stayed until Wilbur’s death in 1992.