Dissociative Identity Disorder

Dissociative Identity Disorder, or DID, is a mental illness that almost no one will recognize by its name: most people often mistake it for schizophrenia, a mental illness that actually consists in exhibiting at least two of the following symptoms:

-            Hallucinations (seeing, hearing, or smelling something that no one else sees, hears or smells)

-            Delusions (false beliefs, often linked to paranoia, such as believing someone is spying on them or that aliens are talking to them)

-            Disorganized speech (may include made-up words or phrases, repeating the same words or statements, rhyming nonsensical words together, or being unable to hold a conversation due to jumping from topic to topic)

-            Grossly disorganized or catatonic behaviour (behaving bizarrely or being unresponsive)

-            Negative symptoms (not exhibiting something that a normal person would, like sociablity or emotional reactions)

The fact that several of these factors have to be present to qualify it as schizophrenia is what makes the individual schizophrenic rather than just a psychopath in the clinical sense of the term – a person suffering from chronic mental disorder with abnormal (sometimes violent for low-functionning psychopaths) behaviour. Although, admittedly, a low-functionning psychopath (a psychopath unable to pass for a neurotypical (“normal”) person) can suffer from schizophrenia, the two are not to be confused, much like DID and schizophrenia.

(It is amazing all the mental illnesses schizophrenia is commonly mistaken for.)

Dissociative Identity Disorder, on the other hand, is a Dissociative Disorder, which can be divided in three main types :

-            Depersonalization Disorder – people with DpD feel detached from their feelings and actions, almost as if they were watching a movie or dreaming. That can also happen to neurotypical people on occasions and is called “dissociating”. There is also the possibility of experiencing derealization, which is feeling like their surroundings aren’t real.

-            Dissociative Amnesia  - having trouble remembering information about themselves, either a lack of memory of a particular traumatic event in their lives, or, more rarely, their identity or past.

-            Dissociative Identity Disorder :

 A person with DID will experience dissociative periods often followed by the surfacing of an “alter”. An Alter is the name given to the different personalities, often each with their own name, voice, accent, age, headspace appearance and so on. All alters live in the headspace, a place inside the “host”’s brain that often takes on the appearance of something that the host associates with feeling safe or happy. Each headspace is different, and so is each alter that lives in it: all alters that the host is aware of (because some alters might “reveal their presence” to the host later) have their own place inside the headspace, be it a house, a room, etc…

DID doesn’t happen out of nowhere: the host develops DID following an important childhood trauma that their young brain was unable to cope with, thus creating alters in their brain to try to work through it. Not all alters are created at the same time. They can be caregivers, littles, or just have a specific role in the system: caregivers are often older than the host and their appearance, age, etc, varies according to what makes the host feel safest. Their role is to protect the host, either from themselves or their environment.

Littles are alters that are younger than the host and thus need and thus need adult supervision and attention, much like real children: I suppose their presence is born out of a form of longing for a typical childhood.

The rest of the alters have different tasks in the system that will prompt them to come out and be in charge of the body in different situations, but they are all very much three-dimensional people: they can not and should not be reduced to their role in the system.

The idea of evil alters that Hollywood is so fond of is false; when an alter is aggressive or destructive, they are often so towards the host or the system itself, and certainly not mindlessly or simply out of a desire to hurt: nothing about DID is casual or without reason.

All alters in the system, if they have revealed themselves to the host, are able to interact as a community and work out ways to act in public or at work in the event of a shift from one alter to the other. And yes, people with DID can live relatively normal lives, despite their common memory troubles (often regarding their trauma).

It is possible to cure DID through intensive psychiatric and therapeutic work on a long period of time, at the term of which all alters may integrate the host’s consciousness, making them a whole in themself as they were before their trauma.

For further and more on-hand information about DID, there is a Youtube Channel called The Entropy System which is run by a system and talks about DID in very clear and easy to understand terms.

Mara