Dissociative Identity Disorder
Medical Author: Roxanne Dryden-Edwards, MD
Medical Editor: Melissa Conrad Stöppler, MD
What is dissociative identity disorder?
Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is a mental illness that involves the
sufferer experiencing at least two clear identities or personality states, each
of which has a fairly consistent way of viewing and relating to the world. Some
individuals with DID have been found to have personality states that have
distinctly different ways of reacting, in terms of emotions, pulse, blood
pressure, and blood flow to the brain. This
disorder was formerly called multiple personality disorder (MPD) and is often
referred to as split personality disorder. Although statistics regarding this
disorder indicate that the incidence of DID is about 3% of patients in
psychiatric hospitals and is described as occurring in females nine times more
often than in males, this may be due to difficulty identifying the disorder in
males. Also, disagreement among mental-health professionals about how this
illness appears clinically, and if DID even exists, adds to the difficulty of
estimating how often it occurs.
Some professionals continue to be of the opinion that DID does not exist. The
nature of this skepticism is sometimes due to questions about why many more
individuals who have endured the stress of terrible abuse as young children do
not develop the disorder, why more children are not diagnosed as having DID, and
why some DID sufferers have no history of tremendous trauma. One explanation for what some believe to be these inconsistencies is that
given the highly complex and unknown nature of the human brain and psyche, many
of those whom one would expect to develop dissociative identity disorder are
spared due to their resilience. Another concern about the diagnosis of DID
involves having to rely on the traumatic memories of those who suffer from this
disorder. That DID is significantly more often assessed in individuals in North
America compared to the rest of the world, for the most part, leads some
practitioners to believe that DID is a culture-based myth rather than a true
disorder. As with many other mental-health issues, symptoms of
the same disorder in children look very different than in adults. Studies that
verify the presence of DID using multiple resources add credibility to the
diagnosis. Research on individuals with DID that have little
to no media exposure to information on the illness lends further credibility to
the reliability of this diagnosis.
Movies about DID have been well known in the United States since the 1950s. The 1953 movie The Three Faces of Eve
tells the story of Chris Sizemore, a
real-life woman with the disorder. She was thought to develop DID in reaction to
witnessing several terrible accidents at a young age. That movie described three
personalities that were successfully merged or integrated into one within one
year. More accurately, the person depicted in that movie had to contend with 22
personalities that took more than 45 years to be able to coexist in a functional
way. A miniseries about DID was Sybil. The character of Sybil
Dorsett portrayed the life story of Shirley Ardell Mason, who experienced severe
physical, emotional, and sexual abuse that was inflicted by her mother. She was
thought to develop 16 distinct identities. As with
the diagnosis in general, the veracity of the story of Sybil remains a
controversy, with claims that the illness in general, and Sybil specifically, is
a hoax.
Next: What are the signs and symptoms of dissociative identity disorder? »
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