Sybil and Psychological Disorders

It was the horrific child abuse Sybil's psychotic mother inflicted on her, along with the failure of her father to rescue her from it that caused these personalities. Each one embodied feelings and emotions the 'real' Sybil could not cope with. The waking Sybil was deprived of all these emotions, of anger and aggressiveness just to name a few. And was therefore a rather dreary figure. She was unaware of her other personas; while they were in 'control' of the body, Sybil suffered blackouts and did not remember the episodes. It was only the intervention of Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, a psychoanalyst, which alerted Sybil to them. The case of Sybil is the one most often credited with reintroducing the public and the mental health professions to the syndrome of multiple personality. Multiple personality disorder (MPD) is a psychiatric disorder characterized by having at least one "alter" personality that controls behavior. The "alters" are said to occur spontaneously and involuntarily, and function more or less independently of each other. In 1994, the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-IV replaced the designation of MPD with DID: Dissociative Disorders are characterized by a disruption in the normal functioning of consciousness, identity, memory, or the world around her / him. Dissociative Disorders can be acute or chronic. All of the dissociative disorders are thought to stem from trauma experienced by the individual with this disorder. The dissociative aspect is thought to be a coping mechanism -- the person literally dissociates himself from a situation or experience too traumatic to integrate with his conscious self. Symptoms of these disorders, or even one or more of the disorders themselves, are also seen in a number of other mental illnesses, including post-traumatic stress disorder, panic disorder, and obsessive compulsive disorder. Sybil Dorsett was a woman with sixteen separate personalities. At first none of them knew or remembered any of the others. For instance, one personality named Victoria Antoinette Scharleau was a self-assured, sophisticated, attractive blond, and another named Mike Dorsett thought she was male, a builder and carpenter. This kind of multiple personality disorder is often caused by extreme negative events as a child. In Sybil's case, she was tortured and sexually abused as a young girl. This caused her to break up, literally, because she could not bear the extreme abuse she was subjected to.

DSMIV