Debbie Nathan > Quotes

“It was getting harder, however. American magazines still looked shiny and lively, but by the early 1960s, writers like Flora were sensing trouble. With television's exploding popularity, more and more people were staring at screens instead of turning pages. Big corporations like car manufacturers were pulling their advertising dollars out of print and spending them on the airwaves. Magazines were bleeding ad pages and readers, and editors scrambled to balance budgets by retooling audiences.”
― Debbie Nathan, Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case

“Indeed, the vast majority of unwed mothers younger than eighteen are indigent, and a substantial minority of their babies’ fathers are men who are at least six years their senior—which in most states legally defines the mothers as child sex-abuse victims.1 Yet teenage mothers usually call these men their boyfriends. And although their attempts to find fulfillment with older partners may in the long run fail, few would call themselves victims of sexual abuse. The lack of better words to describe their problematic experience with older men, and the young women’s own refusal to adopt victim identities, make them easy scapegoats for conservatives anxious to cast them not as innocent children but as sluts—and to justify cuts in welfare spending for them and their offspring.”
― Debbie Nathan, Satan's Silence

“... very few people know that porn has not been shown to cause mental illness or crime... there is no evidence for this cause-effect relationship, according to many researchers who have tested this claim with studies.”
― Debbie Nathan, Pornography

“A later Times article noted that, as a result of her MPD therapy, one plaintiff, a woman from Iowa born in the late 1950s, had remembered having sex with President John F. Kennedy. The woman was seven years old when Kennedy was assassinated.”
― Debbie Nathan, Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case

“There were about eight of them, mostly men. And all became practicing psychiatrists. In the coming decades, half would be accused of having sex with their patients. Most of these would lose their licenses, temporarily or permanently. One, charged with having sex with teenage boys, would shoot himself to death.

Lexington psychiatrists who had not been Connie's children would follow these shocking events and speculate about the extent to which they'd flowed from Wilbur's bad behaviour. Had her boundary violations with the young residents encouraged their own violations against patients? People chewed over the question, which had no firm answer.

One thing was certain, however. During Connie's tenure at the university, Lexington, Kentucky became as efficient at manufacturing multiple personalities as it did at producing racehorses.”
― Debbie Nathan, Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case

“When the bestseller, Michelle Remembers, came out, a book about a patient who suddenly recalled that her parents were Satanists who had led their coven in sexually torturing little Michelle when she was only five years old. It was co-authored by Dr. Lawrence Pazder, a Catholic psychiatrist in Canada, and Michelle Smith, Pazder's patient, and later, his wife.”
― Debbie Nathan, Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case

“Flora, Connie, and Shirley, decided to cash in on the book's success even further. They contacted a lawyer in Kentucky, drew up papers, and emerged with an enterprise for marketing Sybil-related products. Sybil T-shirts, Sybil lapel buttons, Sybil board games, Sybil dolls.”
― Debbie Nathan, Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case

“Experts had been warning teachers for decades that children with no siblings were peculiar. They tended to social awkwardness and they played with imaginary companions. As one psychologist put it, being an only child was a disease in itself.”
― Debbie Nathan, Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case

“Connie wrote a final notation in Shirley's file, "All personalities, one". The date was September 2nd, 1965, almost 11 years after their first psychotherapy session on Park Avenue. Having been declared cured, Shirley packed her things ... Flora had her happy ending exactly when she wanted it. Now, she could do the book.”
― Debbie Nathan, Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case

“The idea, for instance, that asthma, arthritis, and even diabetes were manifestations of neurosis caused by bad mothering.”
― Debbie Nathan, Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case

“Almost four years had passed since Shirley first walked into Connie's office, as an upbeat graduate student with nagging, but bearable, emotional problems. Now, after hundreds of hours of therapy and countless pills, shots, and machine-induced convulsions, she was a 35-year-old junkie who spent most of her time in bed, and who, when she did get up, checked her mailbox for money from her father or walked the streets, muttering to herself.”
― Debbie Nathan, Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case