Multiple Personalities

When the term multiple personalities is mentioned, a pretty wild picture usually appears in the mind of most people. If you think about it, you may think of a talk show special or a TV movie of the week you've watched on disassociative identity disorder. These shows might be rather entertaining, but they offer a pretty skewed picture of multiple personalities. Even though this condition dose exist and has been well documented, it is also quite rare. Even with psychotic conditions, multiple personality disorder is very rare. However, it does exist. Thousands of individuals have been afflicted by this bizarre and crippling phenomenon.

Similar to the majority of psychiatric conditions, multiple personalities are a way people cope with internal stress when they have no other way of dealing with it. Most of the people who have multiple identities have been victims of childhood abuse. They usually have had no stable adults in their lives, because they were passed around from family member to family member. On account of this lack of stability, they suffer from acute anxiety and disassociation. They feel powerless and unable to cope with their lives, so they invent other selves to deal with their issues. They might have one to deal with anger issues, another one which is cheerful and unaware of what is going on, a third that has given up on hope altogether, etc. The personalities separate themselves as a way of coping with problems that they are unable to deal with by themselves.

One of the common misconceptions about multiple personalities is that individual who are afflicted with this disorder always have many different discrete personalities. In fact, this is simply not true. Multiple personalities are often quite flowing. Various aspects of the different personalities will frequently switch places at different times based on the needs of the patient. The patient is often convinced that his or her multiple personas do exist. Someone else watching him will merely see the patient talking to himself. The personality features between the different personas will not be significant enough to be noticeable.

However, there are times when the very sensational cases do happen. There have been recorded cases of individuals with more than a dozen different personalities, and occasionally they can indeed take on different roles. I even personally know of stories about individual with multiple personalities who live various different lives at the same time, with no knowledge of the other events happening in their life from one personality to the next. It's like the right hand really does not know what the left hand is doing. These are the most sensational cases around, but they are not very common. For the most part, when it comes to psychiatric illnesses, the more sensational it is the rarer it is.

article by David Lloyd