Product Description

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

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #880369 in Books
• Published on: 1999-08-13
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 9.00" h x .52" w x 6.00" l, .92 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Reading this acerbic and witty debunking of the Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) diagnosis is like staying long enough in a courtroom to listen to a brilliant prosecuting attorney and then walking out before the defense. Acocella, the coauthor of a psychology textbook, Abnormal Psychology, builds a highly convincing case against mental health professionals whom she portrays as exploiters who prompted the mass hysteria and witch-hunts that have resulted from recovered memory syndrome and the MPD diagnosis. (This book requires a mastery of numerous acronyms.) However, she proceeds to undercut her own argument by destroying all in her path: the child-protection movement, the credibility of women who say they were abused as children, the self-help (AA) movement, the feminist movement, insight-based psychotherapy, "New-Age spirituality" and postmodern theory are just a few of the victims of her sweep. Like all good prosecutors, Acocella has no qualms about using one set of beliefs, events or institutions as evidence and then discrediting the same set when the next stage of her argument requires it. She presents the media, for example, as having disregarded the truth in its pursuit of ratings when it embraced MPD and its offshoots, but the same media evolves into a champion of justice in her appraisal of its support of the False Memory Syndrome (FMS) Foundation. "Managed care" is villainous when it supports FMS but heroic when it balks at financing long-term treatment of MPD or indeed any prolonged therapy. One of the many ideologies she savages (while alternately using it to prove her points) is social constructivism. In fact, a broader sense of truth as a shifting and culturally located construct would have made her argument far more convincing. Agent, Robert Comfield. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Based on the premise that mental disorders go in and out of vogue, this book traces the development of the Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)/Recovered Memory movement from its beginnings (as the story of Sybil) to its heyday (in the 1980s). New Yorker writer Acocella (Abnormal Psychology) uses case studies, research, and original analysis to show that the movement is itself a form of social hysteria. Although it serves the needs of troubled women and the "therapy establishment," concern about this disorder deflects attention from what Acocella considers to be more serious social ills. This book, which reads like a well-written, expanded journal article, competently covers recent psychological history, including the Satanic cult scares of the 1970s. However, while criticizing the science of MPD, Acocella posits thinly substantiated claims against feminism, intellectuals, and the psychiatric establishment for encouraging the diagnosis. Recommended for comprehensive women's studies and psychology collections.AAntoinette Brinkman, Southwest Indiana Mental Health Ctr. Lib., Evansville
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Acocella is well known as a dance critic (Mark Morris, 1990), but she is also coauthor of a text on abnormal psychology; her current book began as a 1998 New Yorker article. She deftly links the epidemic of hysteria diagnoses in the late nineteenth century to the explosion of multiple personality disorder (MPD) diagnoses over recent decades; both periods, she maintains, reflected "widespread, bitter intellectual debate, a war between biological and psychological psychiatry, a fascination with the occult, an obsession with sex and an explosion of pornography, a new concern over cruelty to children, feminism and opposition to feminism." Acocella traces MPD's history; the therapy applied and its theoretical scientific basis; and the trajectory (crisis, outcry, retrenchment) of public attitudes toward the related issues of recovered memory, MPD, and satanic ritual abuse. Feminism and the child-protection movement bear some of the blame for MPD diagnosis and treatment abuses, but Acocella argues that these abuses have weakened the credibility of both movements as well as of insight therapy in general. Mary Carroll