Sybil II -- Untangling Threads-- Does DID even exist?

I loved the book Sybil. I adored the movie. I did not question the veracity of either. It was a tale told by the actual doctor and patient in the story. Telling their own tale...has to be true. Right?

Right?

I wrote about Angela's Ashes and seeing Frank McCourt. I was much older when that book came out, and more skeptical. I heard Frank McCourt speak while attending a Seminar on Memoir in Key West. It was a life-changing seminar. A memoir is not an autobiography. It doesn't list facts...it tells how the writer experienced a certain thing at a certain time. Still, it is not a license to fantasize.

Is there any truth in Sybil? It's odd how drawn to it I was as a teen-- then 30-some years later I get my own DID diagnosis. It was almost...

Thrilling.

But what is this condition that may or may not really exist? Dunno. I'll try to find out though.

Before the publication of ""Sybil,'' there were only about 75 reported cases of MPD; in the 25 years since, there have been, by one expert's estimation, 40,000 diagnoses, almost all in North America. 

I met people in a psych hospital who were convinced they'd been through Satanic Ritual Abuse, even after Satanic Ritual Abuse was shown to be a hoax. What happens when the mental illness that has plagued you all your life suddenly becomes fantasy? If it didn't happen, why am I so screwed up? They were nice people. I wanted to believe them. I wanted them to be okay.

But how can you begin to recover when the very premise of your existence is questioned? Where do you begin?

The most gripping part of Sybil, for me, was the horrific abuse the little girl suffered at the hands of her demented mother. Without this, the story is much less compelling. The abuse was unbelievable. Maybe because it never really happened. We want to belief reports of abuse, but there have been documented cases where horrible abuse was planted in the patient's mind. People went to jail for abuse that was a fantasy all along.

"There is strong evidence that [the worst abuse in the book] could not have happened,'' says Peter J. Swales, the historian who first identified Mason as Sybil.


Goebbels said to live a fulfilled life you must believe in something with all your heart and mind. It didn't matter, he said, whether that thing was true or false. Only that you believed. That was the key to happiness.

I feel on the edge. All I want is to be safe.