Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is the current name of the condition formerly listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) and Multiple Personality Syndrome. The International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems continues to list it as Multiple Personality Disorder. Multiple Personality Disorder should not be confused with schizophrenia.
According to standard American textbooks in clinical psychology, Dissociative Identity Disorder is a psychological condition characterized by the use of dissociation as a primary defense mechanism. A chronic reliance on dissociation as a means of defending against stressors in the environment causes the individual to experience their psyche/identity as disconnected or split into distinct parts.
This diagnosis is controversial. The main points of disagreement are:
Whether MPD/DID is a real disorder, or just a fad.
If it is real, is the appearance of multiple personalities real or delusional?
Whether it can be cured.
Whether it should be cured.
Who should primarily define the experience — therapists, or multiples.
Whether it is invariably a disorder or simply a way of being.
In rough terms, believers in DID or MPD argue that children who are stressed or abused (especially sexually abused), split into several independent personalities or ego states as a defense mechanism. How people with DID/MPD perceive their actions varies, but often only one personality (or “alter”) can control the body at any given time. Sometimes alters are co-conscious and share all memories. Sometimes each alter remembers only the times when he/she/it controlled the body, and has amnesia for all other periods. People diagnosed with DID may exhibit erratic alterations of personality and may “lose time”.
Skeptics claim that people who act as if they have MPD/DID have learned to exhibit the symptoms in return for social reinforcement, either from therapists, from others with DID, from society at large or from any combination thereof. Believers in DID retort that people with the syndrome really do have multiple selves or experience themselves so, really cannot control their behaviors, and should be treated with the same respect and consideration afforded those with other mental disorders.
In addition, some people would argue that it is normal to experience oneself as multiple and that “multiplicity” is not necessarily a disorder, so that it is possible to be multiple without having MPD or DID.
Lisa Angelettie, M.S.W., is a psychotherapist, author, and life coach. She has been helping people make smarter life choices since 1998. Get more free tips like this when you subscribe to the GirlShrink newsletter .
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