I believe in Multiple Personality Disorder. For a lot of people, this is akin to believing in the Tooth Fairy or deer with red noses. To make it more palatable, the behavior was renamed a while back to Associative Identity Disorder. Not that that helps things much.
Believers by and large stay deep in the closet on this one if they don’t want people to laugh and call them names. Psychologists and social workers who have toiled among society’s more fragile folks have often been spooked by it. They think they can even see physical changes as a ‘personality system’ moves from identity to identity. A person might be a diabetic in one personality but not in others. A scar might grow fainter in the identities that didn’t experience the actual wound. An aggressive man might take on the look and voice of a terrified child.
Weird science. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
Take a look at this article from the Washington Post that reports a new study of a blind woman, saying : It was while seeking treatment for her dissociative identity disorder that the ability to see suddenly returned.
And in case you are of the liar-liar-pants-on-fire school, the article goes on to say: One explanation, that B.T. was “malingering,” or lying about her disability, was disproved by an EEG test. When B.T. was in her two blind states, her brain showed none of the electrical responses to visual stimuli that sighted people would display — even though B.T.’s eyes were open and she was looking right at them.
How do I react to this article? Vindication? No, not that so much as a deepened belief that the brain is too big a mystery for people to count things out. Besides, this sort of blindness in some of our identities may be the only explanation for American politics these days.
1 comments
I have a friend who suffers from this. I totally believe her as I’ve seen some of the other personalities, and they are distinct individuals. You are right in that the individual affected is often, if not always, the object of disbelief, and goes through hell because of others’ preconceptions of the illness. I hope that someday they will be able to convince the general public that this is a real disorder, and people suffering with it will not be judged so harshly.