Sybil: Multiple Personality Disorder

For my teachers choice assignment I decided to choose the movie Sybil. I have always been interested in pyschological disorders especially multiple personalities. This movie depicts the disorder so well that it delivers a sense of sympathy for those suffering with the disorder. Sybil was orginally a book about true event of a woman who suffered multiple personality disorder but then created a film about it. The film is much better in my opinion. In 1979 the movie Sybil was produced and this film represents a young, awkward woman who eventually gets diagnosed with multiple personality disorder. This woman is Sybil. She suffered with this disorder most of her life after being abused by her mother as a young girl. Sybil would have flashbacks wich ultimately started to trigger some unexplainable

Wilbur the personality Vickie is introducded. Vickie, who knows all about the other personalities tells Wilbur about some of them, one of them named Marsha, who is suicidal and wants Sybil dead , and then theres Vanessa, who enjoys playing the piano. Through treatment, Dr. Wilbur finds that Sybil’s dead mother Hattie, was behind the fragmentation of her personality. Sybil explains to her what happened when she was a little girl. When she was growing up in rural Wisconsin, she suffered serious abuse by her mother who treated her normally in front of her father and others but mistreated her continually when they were alone. She explains how her mother would burn her hands on the stove, push her downstairs, and locking her a storage bin inside the barn for long periods of time. It is known that children who are victims of abuse suffer long term conesuences and dysfuntion. In the book “Child Abuse and Neglect” it desribes that anxiety, fear, and suicidal ideas and behavior have also been associated with a history of childhood sexual abuse but force and threat of force may be a necessary concomitant ( Child abuse & neglect,