"Sybil" was a hoax...

... we learn after all these years. But what about the reaction to "Sybil"?

Soon, “multiple personality disorder,” or MPD, became an officially recognized diagnosis, and a handful of cases exploded into 40,000 reported sufferers, nearly all of them female. The repressed-memory industry was born. Only in the last decade or so has the psychiatric profession begun to question the validity of Sybilmania.

Why weren't we — and all those doctors — much more skeptical all along? It was a ridiculously lurid story —"scenes of Sybil’s demented mother defecating on lawns, conducting lesbian orgies and raping her daughter with kitchen utensils." Why did we believe that? And what other hoaxes are we believing?