Poor Mojo's Newswire

. . . The same year that her identity was revealed, Robert Rieber, a psychologist at John Jay, presented a paper at the American Psychological Association in which he accused Mason’s doctor of a “fraudulent construction of a multiple personality,” based on tape-recordings that Schreiber had given him. “It is clear from Wilbur’s own words that she was not exploring the truth but rather planting the truth as she wanted it to be,” Rieber wrote. It wasn’t the first indication that there might be problems with Mason’s diagnosis. As far back as 1994, Herbert Spiegel, an acclaimed psychiatrist and hypnotherapist, began telling reporters that he occasionally treated Shirley Mason when her regular psychiatrist went out of town. During those sessions, Spiegel recalled, Mason asked him if he wanted her to switch to other personalities. When he questioned her about where she got that idea, she told him that her regular doctor wanted her to exhibit alter selves. And yet, in the popular imagination, Sybil and her fractured self remained powerfully tied to the idea of M.P.D. and the childhood traumas it was said to stem from. “Mamma was a bad mamma,” Wilbur declares in the transcripts. “I can help you remember.” But countless other records suggest that the outrages Sybil recalled never happened. If Sybil wasn’t really remembering, then what exactly was Wilbur helping her to do? . . .

. . . The administration of the secretive and secluded Delphian boarding school recruits students with the suggestion that it is a real-world Hogwarts — an enchanted place for teens, deep in the bucolic mountains of western Oregon. “The school in itself, it’s different,” says one smiling teen in an official marketing video for Delphian School. “You know, it’s on a hill, and I’m a big Harry Potter fan … You’ve got the Forbidden Forest out there, it’s like, awesome.” A fresh-faced female student describes it as “kinda magical.” In the video, a swooping shot from a helicopter shows ethereal rays of sunlight illuminating the school’s centerpiece building, an old Jesuit monastery surrounded by towering pines. But there may be reason to question whether all is magic and wonder on that 800-acre Oregon campus. The institution, which counts Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s daughter among its former students, charges more in tuition and fees than Phillips Exeter Academy. Yet it lacks academic accreditation, and relies on Hubbard-inspired teaching methods rejected by mainstream education experts. Founded in the 1970s by Scientologists, Delphian has remained largely a mystery for decades. But with the unraveling of the church’s public face, alumni of the school have begun to speak out. . . .

LUCKNOW, India — The first doctor to die, a senior government health administrator, was shot on his morning walk last October by two men on a motorbike. Six months later, his successor, a cardiologist, was shot to death while out on a predawn stroll. A third government doctor, accused of conspiring to murder the first two, was found dead in jail in June, lying in a pool of blood with deep cuts all over his body. The one thing the doctors had in common? All three had at one point been in charge of spending this city’s portion of the nearly $2 billion that has flowed to Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, as part of a nationwide push to improve the health of India’s poorest citizens. The state’s health infrastructure remains abysmal, and officials say they now suspect that the murders resulted from a virulent combination of fast money, scant oversight and a notoriously graft-addled state political leadership. The last doctor to die, relatives say, was preparing to name names in a widening scandal. The central government has stepped in to investigate. “When this much money is given to a government that is basically a criminal enterprise, violence cannot be ruled out,” said Kamini Jaiswal, a prominent lawyer who has filed several lawsuits in the case. . . .