E-Mailbag: Did '60 Minutes' Fail To Give The Whole Story About Multiple Personality Disorder?

We found this email from Dan B. in our inbox this morning:

Please look into Sunday's "60 Minutes" story about the Asia scholar who wrote a book about his multiple personality disorder. 60 Minutes has a long history of doing stories that are not necessarily objective, but are very fair. (I often think that is the most interesting kind of journalism.) This story was neither. It seemed odd, as a viewer, that Morley Safer would mention that the psychological community is split (no pun intended) on the legitimacy of the diagnosis, but then have no interview with anyone who is critical of MPD. From what I understand, in recent years, there has been increasing skepticism about the diagnosis. Perhaps one reason why multiple personality has taken such a cultural hold is that it makes for good TV and film.

This story did little to advance an ongoing debate, and ended up seeming like a promotion for the man who just published a book. I wonder if Don Hewitt would have let this go to air.

First things first: Before you decide whether or not Dan's got a point, we encourage you to check out the story. It's transcribed here. (One note: Transcribers sometimes make small changes in transcripts like this for readability purposes.) Alas, we can't post video – according to Mike Sims, Director of News and Operations for CBSNews.com, "except in rare cases, our agreements with our affiliates prohibit us from posting entire segments" – but we can offer a small portion of it. That's here:

Video:
'60 Minutes': A Fractured Mind

I watched the full video and read the transcript closely, and found that while it was certainly sympathetic to the scholar in question – Robert Oxnam – it doesn't ignore the issues raised by the emailer.

Consider the following passage:

Robert Oxnam is well aware that his story is a surreal one and that not everybody will believe it. The American Psychiatric Association does consider multiple personalities a true mental disorder, one now called Dissociative Identity.

But on the issue of recovered childhood memories – such as Baby's tale of abuse – the APA notes "some individuals with this disorder are highly hypnotizable and especially vulnerable to suggestive influences."

Recovered memory is still a controversial diagnosis and some think that the memories of other personalities are implanted by psychiatrists.

"I'm not a therapist. I can only tell my own story. I do know that there was no implanting whatsoever. Each time that a personality emerged it was never a suggestion, it was never 'Wouldn't it be good if this happened,'" Oxman said.

Nevertheless, both multiple personality and recovered memory are concepts that continue to divide the psychiatric community. But that has not shaken the belief of Oxnam or his doctor, who swears he never planted anything in Oxnam's mind.

The piece also notes that the 1976 TV movie "Sybil" "put multiple personality disorder in the public eye and led to a huge increase in such diagnoses," a fact that casts some doubt on the veracity of some diagnoses of the disorder.

It's true, however, that the tone of the piece suggests that Safer seems to believe Oxnam. It's full of lines like this one: "Today, many of Oxnam's personalities have merged, leaving just four. There's Robert, Bobby and Tommy. And the witch has become a woman named Wanda." Safer rarely qualifies such claims with an "according to his doctor," or something similar. One might argue about that the passage excerpted above makes such qualifiers unnecessary. But Safer functions in some sense as a stand in for the audience, and his largely credulous take does infuse Oxnam's tale with a degree of authority.

Still, why shouldn't that be the case? "60 Minutes" wouldn't have done the story if it didn't find Oxnam's story credible, after all. If those involved in the story had spent an inordinate amount of time on the debate over multiple personality disorder, it would have changed the fundamental nature of the piece. "60 Minutes" chose to tell one man's story, not the story of the disorder more generally, and the passage above seems to me a sufficient qualifier within that context.

What do you think?