multiple personality

Billy Milligan, otherwise known as The Campus Rapist, committed a series of at least three sexual assaults in the 1970s, and is further suspected of at least two later murders. His case is especially notable, however, because after he was caught, he became the first person to use his diagnosis of multiple personality disorder–now known as dissociative identity disorder–to argue successfully that two of his alternate personalities committed the crimes without the “core” personality being aware of it. Milligan would spend over a decade in various psychiatric hospitals before his release in 1991, and would eventually become the inspiration for M. Night Shyamalan’s 2016 film Split, as well as the subject of the four-part, 2021 Netflix documentary series, Monsters Inside: The 24 Faces of Billy Milligan.

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The book and TV movie called Sybil told the extraordinary story of a woman who manifested sixteen different personalities, allegedly triggered by the horrific abuse she had suffered as a child. In the 1970s and 80s, the case was a cultural phenomenon, and became the flash point in a psychiatric debate that to some extent is still raging today. Is multiple personality disorder (now called dissociative identity disorder) a real illness or simply a misdiagnosed aspect of something else? Did Sybil (whose real name was Shirley Ardell Mason) really have sixteen personalities, or was she coaxed into displaying these symptoms by her ambitious therapist and the author of the best-selling book? Was Sybil truly a victim of her mother’s extreme cruelty, or were these memories implanted under hypnosis? Tom and Jenny discuss the fascinating aspects of this troubling case and try to sort out the fact from the fiction.

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