Shirley Ardell Mason Case Summary

The second case is about personality and identity. A 75-year-old former college art teacher, Shirley Ardell Mason, was one of the world's most famous psychiatric patient - the real-life model for "Sybil," journalist Flora Rheta Schreiber's 1973 best seller about a woman so abused as a child that she developed 16 personalities, including women with English accents and two boys (Miller). After Mason's death, the case is still in the spotlight with three documentaries and at least as many books in the works. A quarter century later, by the time Mason lay dying in her bungalow, many experts were disputing the validity of the multiple-personality diagnosis and blaming the book for spawning a bogus industry of therapists who specialize in hidden …show more content…
She met Wilbur, the psychiatrist, in Omaha after another such collapse; in the early 1950s she moved to New York, where Wilbur then lived, and became her patient (Miller). According to Swales, the therapy ended in 1965 in part because Wilbur had decided to take a job outside New York. Mason did go on to hold several jobs, but she never strayed far from her former therapist. Some researchers say that Mason probably wasn't a "multiple" before she met Wilbur. A psychiatrist who worked with the patient he will refer to only as Sybil says that she was a "brilliant hysteric," highly hypnotizable and extremely suggestible. The doctor, Herbert Spiegel, still in private practice in New York, believes Sybil adopted personalities "suggested" by Wilbur as part of the therapy, which depended upon hypnosis and heavy doses of sodium pentothal (Miller). Whatever the course of the therapy, it does appear to have helped Mason. After Mason died because of breast cancer sometime in 1990, her case of multiple-personality showed the world that personality and identity are two related yet different things, one’s identity may remain the same, but his or her identity does not remain