2015 Reading Challenge [Closed] discussion

This seems like a really interesting story, though I wasn't alive at the time when it was originally hyped in the 70s. I'll be reading it this week.

I'm about a third of the way through this book now. It's going slower than I'd hoped, but that's pretty normal for me and non-fiction to be honest. I'm finding the story to be really interesting though, especially learning about all the different drugs and treatments that were considered safe and ok for use back in this time period. Scary!

Here was my final review:

This is a really difficult book for me to review. Lots of nonfiction books make it onto my TBR because they look really interesting, but very few actually manage to hold my attention (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks being the only recent-ish one I can actually think of off the top of my head). This one was better than many, but not spectacular. The author used a familiar and somewhat informal writing style, which really helped. Plus the subject matter was often quite fascinating.

I had never heard of Sybil before reading a synopsis for this book when it popped up on a friend's feed a while back. But the idea of someone having upwards of 18 different personalities just amazed me. And the idea that it may have all been a trick of some kind that sucked in a huge portion of the population was even more interesting. There is a movie and everything! Would I watch it? Well, it's on Netflix... the plot seems pretty different from what is described in this book, however.

Learning about the different things that used to be acceptable in psychology was really interesting. Although even the book admitted that many of the things "Dr. Connie" did to and with her client would have been frowned upon by her peers and lost her a lot of respect had they known, even if it wasn't technically against the rules yet. But many of the things that come to light in this book -- the nature of the drugs used, the suggesting nature of the questioning, the fact that Shirley's letter claiming that she had been faking was just flat-out ignored -- really have me shaking my head in wonderment that things have changed so much in the last 50 years.

I truly felt bad for Shirley for most of this book. It's clear that she did have some problems, but she was being treated for something else entirely. Had she been born 30 years later, her life probably would have turned out much differently. I wasn't a big fan of Dr. Connie, but in a way I can sort of understand... the field was still very new, the drugs weren't fully understood, the research on the suggestive nature of questioning hadn't been done, and so laws weren't in place yet that now make this impossible. Things that we now see as "common sense" just plain weren't known about yet. So I can't blame her for everything... although some of her decisions were clearly wrong and not in the best interest of her patient. But the JOURNALIST... wow. She is actually the one who I feel did the most wrong. It seems as if she went in with her scruples, and even realized something wasn't quite right, but rather than pulling out, she went ahead and fudged some details and published her story anyway, pushing it out into the national scene, using her credentials as a journalist to make the public believe in the story. Ugh.

I read the original book, Sybil while I was a curious teen. It was such an odd book that I liked it. Even though people said it was a hoax. I'm super interested now to re-read it as an adult and this new book about the hoax.

What a terrible to play on people. How did everyone get away with it? Why would they begin something like this? Did you discover any of these answers? Or shed light on them?

I read the original book, Sybil while I was a curious teen. It was such an odd book that I liked it. Even though people said it was a hoax. I'm super interested now to re-read it as an adult and this new book about the hoax.

What a terrible to play on people. How did everyone get away with it? Why would they begin something like this? Did you discover any of these answers? Or shed light on them?