‘Three Faces of Eve’ : Mental Health Crusader Recalls Own Anguish

RAMSEUR, N.C. —  Her body once was home to three personalities at a time, but now Chris Costner Sizemore is one person working with the energy of three to call attention to the needs of the mentally ill.

Sizemore’s psychiatric case was one of the most celebrated in history. The book and movie “The Three Faces of Eve” were based on her struggle with multiple personalities. She finally conquered the neurosis in 1975, after 46 years of torment for herself and confusion for the people close to her. She understands the need for enlightened treatment, family support and community tolerance.

“I’m an advocate to dispel the stigma of mental illness,” she said in an interview at her spacious home. “I’m well now--I’m a success story--but not all mental patients are. For many of them, it’s enough of a struggle to survive without feeling they are a disgrace or a burden to their family. Even the medical community doesn’t approach it right.

“Not being ashamed of it--if I’ve got one message, that’s it.”

Pleas for Better Care

In speeches to dozens of mental health associations and school groups around the country, the 60-year-old grandmother points out that one of every three U.S. households is affected by mental illness.

Although many people still regard all mental patients as violent people who should be locked up, she said, most of them simply need better psychiatric treatment.

“There is treatment for all, and some can be cured,” she said. “It’s a matter of getting the proper care and support system.”

Sizemore’s illness is well documented. It began when she was 2 years old and saw a drowned man near her home in Edgefield, S.C., another man who had been chopped into three pieces in a lumber mill accident, and a bad cut on her mother’s arm.

As she hid in fear, she saw another little girl run for help. She was the first of 22 personalities that lived in Sizemore’s body, three at a time, for the next 46 years.

Widely Varied Personae

Her personalities had names such as the Purple Lady, the Turtle Lady, the Card Girl and the Retrace Lady. They were of different ages, skills, voices, IQs, moods and habits. Some of them knew and disliked each other, and some had relationships with her family, her former husband, her present husband, Don--an electrician now retired--and with their son and daughter.

“As a child, I was not aware that other people were different,” she said. “But once I started school, I knew I was unacceptable and different from other people. As a result, I became a loner.

“As a wife and mother, I started to lose time, and my major concern then was for my small children. The fear really began once my first child was born (in 1948). From that day on, I lived with constant fear that something would happen to me or a member of my family.”

That first child, Taffy, lived with her grandparents for the first few years of her life. As she grew older, she helped take care of her mother and brother, Bobby, who was born in 1959.

When Sizemore was 26, she began undergoing treatment at the urging of her father, a physically handicapped mechanic.

Lived in Isolation

“Dad insisted that I get private help,” she said. “It would have been perfectly normal for me to be put away, but I’m grateful I wasn’t.”

Still, she lived in “absolute fear and isolation.”

“Each time I had a change in personality, I had a feeling maybe I was dying, that I may not be able to get back, that this may be the last minute I have on Earth,” she said. “I later had to have therapy for dying, because I had actually died 22 times.”

Sizemore said she also felt tremendous guilt about depriving her family.

“The treatment was very expensive--we sold our homes three times,” she said. “But my husband and children said to me that if I had cancer, they’d be doing this. And once I was a well person contributing to the family, then my guilt disappeared.”

Her psychiatrist, Dr. Corbett Thigpen, described her case in “The Three Faces of Eve” in 1955. He concluded that she had recovered and had integrated into her “Jane” personality, but the other personalities kept resurfacing for another 20 years.

‘Something So Wrong’

“It sort of said to me that there was something so wrong with me that even the doctor who diagnosed me couldn’t help me any longer,” Sizemore recalled.

Meanwhile, the book became a movie of the same name, and Joanne Woodward won the Academy Award for her portrayal of Sizemore.

Around 1974, during three years of treatment with another psychiatrist near her northern Virginia home, Sizemore began integrating her personalities. Over a year’s time, the others seemed to die and she eventually reverted to her original personality, which was still a little girl.

“It was the first time I was there since I was 2,” she said. “I felt like my body was too big. It was a real struggle to put my life together, to pick up the pieces and go on.”

It was about this time that she made her first speech. She thought she was going to address a small class, but word of her identity leaked out and she faced 500 people, including reporters, and television cameras.

In 1977, she wrote her own account of her illness, “I’m Eve.” In 1985, she made 172 speeches; in 1986, although a back injury forced her to slow down, she gave about 100 talks.

Consultant on Disorder

She has advised the FBI on multiple-personality disorders. She helped found an international organization dedicated to research on such problems. She has lobbied state and national legislators on mental health issues, and is currently working on a telephone counseling service for the mentally ill.

Although she is paid only expenses and nominal fees for speaking to mental health organizations, she charges up to $1,000 to speak at universities and to private groups.

“I want to earn my own way--it gives me a feeling of self-worth and self-respect,” she said. “That’s something that excites me. If mental patients can get a skill, they can earn their own way. It’s an awful feeling being dependent on someone else.”

Sizemore, who moved to North Carolina in 1985 when her husband retired here, also earns money from her paintings, which number about 10 a year. Although she lost some skills--such as sewing--that some of her former personalities had, she retains the artistic ability that seven of them showed.

Advocates Art Therapy

Painting can aid in the diagnosis of mental problems, and also gives patients an outlet, Sizemore said. She advocates art therapy for mental patients, prisoners and disturbed children.

She still has 19 paintings done by her former personalities. “Eve’s Inferno,” by the left-handed Card Girl, looks like a hellish Van Gogh nightmare. The Turtle Lady’s copies of Goya masterpieces are dark and quiet.

“I’m a mood painter,” she said. “Prayerfully, I’ll never have some of those moods again.”

She said her former personalities are gone for good. A few years ago, however, she painted some ballerinas in what she thought was a new style for her, then recognized it as the Art Nouveau style the Purple Lady had favored.

Another recent painting shows a solitary boy standing on the dark earth, reaching hopefully toward the sky. She said it was inspired by a young friend whose family had been touched by mental illness.

“The most challenging thing has been to get out and meet people,” she said. “I spent more than 20 years isolated from people, and I was all prepared to be rejected, but it has been the most wonderful thing, the one thing that was missing.”