She is best known for a book, written by Flora Rheta Schreiber, and two television films titled Sybil, about the psychiatric treatment she rendered to a person diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder.
While in medical school, she became the first female extern at Kalamazoo State Hospital, where she also successfully treated an agoraphobic girl diagnosed with hysteria.
[2] Wilbur practiced psychiatry in Omaha, Nebraska; New York City; and Weston, West Virginia.
[1] Wilbur is best known for her work with Shirley Ardell Mason, who was purported to have been severely abused as a child, and who developed 16 alternate personalities as a result.
A book, written by Flora Rheta Schreiber, and a television film, both titled Sybil, were ostensibly non-fiction accounts of the psychiatric treatment received by Mason while in Wilbur's care.
Wilbur joined the University of Kentucky College of Medicine in 1967, earning an appointment as a professor of psychiatry.
[5] In the late 1970s, Wilbur consulted on the case of Billy Milligan, the first man to be acquitted of a crime in the United States by reason of insanity due to multiple personality disorder.
In 1987, she was honored for her Distinguished Achievements by the International Society for the Study of Multiple Personality and Dissociative Disorders.