By McKenzie Rogers
Media creates movie magic and complex stories in many different genres. They make people scream in thrillers, laugh in comedies, cry in tragedies. How they choose to handle topics can help shape and form the public's opinion or interest in the topic. When Hollywood takes on psychological issues, they tend to romanticize or tailor them to fit the narrative they want to write. Multiple Personalities in a person are usually portrayed as scary or odd in pop culture and society, even though most of what people say about it isn’t even true. As a matter of fact, the name of the disorder isn’t even Multiple Personality Disorder anymore. In 1994, its name was changed to Dissociative Identity Disorder or DID to better fit the new information learned about the disorder. People believe a lot of untrue things about this disorder and they pass on those beliefs to their friends and family.
One myth is that people with DID are likely to be violent. The way the media portrays people with DID, like in Split, is inaccurate. The antagonist of that film was a man diagnosed to have 23 different personalities who kidnapped young girls. The man also allegedly had a very beastly and violent 24th identity that would emerge in the film to possibly hurt the girls. People with DID are not any more likely to be violent than those without it. In reality, because of their traumatic/abused experiences, they are more likely to fall back into the role of victims of violence, physical and mental. People think DID is the same as schizophrenia. With Dissociative Identity Disorder comes multiple alters. Alter is the term used for the various identities or ‘people’ in the mind of someone with DID. Sometimes, the alters in the body can communicate with one another, occasionally in the form of the alters hearing each other’s voices. Although some people with DID have been known to hear the voices of their alters, they are not just hearing imaginary voices created through hallucinations. Schizophrenia often involves someone having delusions, seeing hallucinations, disorganized speech, and actions. On the other hand, someone with DID is often described as someone with at least two and often more distinct identity states.
“There is no definitive medical test for any mental illness, and most mental health professionals don't have the time or resources to dig as deep as one hopes,” Kate White writes from Healthy Place.com. Since there are no definitive tests for DID, many are incorrectly diagnosed with many other disorders including schizophrenia..
There are people that believe patients are faking their alters for attention or think this disorder is not real. Once again, alters are the various identities or ‘people’ in the mind of someone with DID. Recognized mental disorders are found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or the DSM for short. A study in DSM said this about alters: "The alters may be few or many, of various ages, including older than the body, same- or cross-gendered, hetero- or homosexual, alive or dead... which may not be commutative (i.e., may be one-way), communicating not at all, or through hallucinations, or direct thought transfer, manifesting different physiological signs in the body when out...When out, a given host or alter may appear globally to be mentally and behaviorally whole and normal or an exaggerated caricature or a single-function agent, and so on, but not necessarily [equal] with the age and gender of the body" (Dell & O'Neil, 2009). Recognized mental disorders are recognized to be real in the DSM, a manual for psychologists and psychiatrists.
Plenty more myths about Dissociative Identity Disorder exist. These include that people with DID are unable to function properly in day to day life, you have DID because there are times when you zone out and that severe mood swings equal DID. People with DID are not something we see everyday and different from most other people right now on the planet. Those with DID make up about the same amount of the population as redheads do. Knowing the facts about their disorder benefits those with the disorder and without it.
References to this information: mayoclinic.org; DissociaDID channel on YT who gets their information from US National Library of Medicine, Positive Outcomes For Dissociative Survivors website, a PSU article, Dell, P. F., & O'Neil, J. A. (2009). Dissociative multiplicity and psychoanalysis. In Dissociation and the dissociative disorders: DSM-V and beyond (p. 301). New York: Routledge. Healthyplace.com
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