Crazy? CA-RAY-RA-ZAY!

As a teenager I read Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber. Yes, I was a teenager that read. But I also bullied the few kids nerdier than me so don't start any shit, bucko.

Sybil the true story (the author, Schreiber, was a friend and confidant of the real Sybil) of the first thoroughly documented case of a multiple personality sufferer's other personality's becoming re-assimilated with the original personality they had become fragmented from.

The book begins with Sybil standing under a streetlight on a unfamiliar street, in a city she doesn't recognise, with none of her belongings. In her pocket is a single hotel room key, which she has also never seen before. The moment previously she had been standing in an elevator in her college in New York. To Sybil, the time that had passed between standing in the elevator and standing in the street had passed within the blink of an eye but she now found herself in a completely unfamiliar environment with no idea how she got there (I've had this this happen to me on more than one occasion and I've found myself wishing it was Muliple Personality disorder, as opposed to just being really drunk).

Unbeknownst to Sybil, in the elevator a different personality had taken control of her body, a personality that loved to travel. This personality took a cab to the airport, flew to a different city, checked into a hotel and went for a walk. She then ceased control of the body, and left Sybil standing in the street. This had been happening to Sybil for most of her life; once, she was standing by the grave at her grandmothers funeral and the next moment she was sitting in her class at school. Her classmates weren't all the same, and looked older. She eventually realised two years had elapsed and she had no memory of it.

Sybil had 16 different distinct personalities- 14 women, two men. To them, the personalities all had a different appearance (the men, when prompted to describe their appearance, described men), one was french, some were adults, some children. Sybil's subconscious created the personalities to combat emotions that Sybil herself could not handle, so when Sybil felt a strong emotion the personality most adept at dealing with that emotion would come forward. Some were self destructive, some just wanted to help. Some were sausages (that's a lie). It was an incredible story, hard to believe but undeniably true.

ANYWAY, that was a long winded way of getting to this. This is a great but dated docomentary on Multiple Personalities. Most bizarrely, one of the women interviewed has to check into a mental facility because one of her personalities is threatening to kill her. Less bizarrely, another one wants to go shopping.