Creating Hysteria: Women and Multiple Personality Disorder

From 1985 to 1995 an estimated 40,000 Americans, most of them women, were told they suffered from multiple personality disorder. Feminists, fundamentalists, and a substantial portion of the mental health community Andorsed this Sybil-ing of America. Sensation-seeking television talk shows took up the MPD rallying cry. In Creating Hysteria, Joan Acocella tells a riveting tale of therapists betraying their patients, of a psychotherapy profession at war within its own ranks, and finally of expatients rising up and putting an And to the MPD scandal.



Creating Hysteria exposes one of the most frightening mental rollercoaster rides taken by thousands of people in modern times. Joan Acocella brilliantly illuminates how the mental health profession spearheaded, perhaps inadvertently, a fin-de-siecle hysteria, the fallout from which will take us into the next millennium. Anyone who has ever been interested in mental health should read this book. --Elizabeth Loftus, president, American Psychological Society