Understanding Multiple personality and Dissociative Identity disorder

In order to understand Multiple Personality and Dissociative Identity disorders, you have to realize that those who suffer from it, switch personalities unknowingly and unwillingly. Try to honestly remember how you feel when you get boiling mad and go off on someone. We have all done this. Did you really want to feel that way? Did you like the way in which you behaved?

Think of the times you behaved badly to a loved one, only to approach them afterwards and say, "I'm so sorry that I said those things. I don't know what I was thinking. That was not what I really feel." This may be a way to begin to understand this disorder.

Patients with these disorders typically don't remember very much about their adolescence, which suggests emotional trauma or physical or sexual abuse. Situations such as these cause them to separate themselves by developing other personalities.

Dissociative Identity disorder is quite common and is usually associated with general psychiatric disorders and in certain drug abuse situations. A patient suffering from split personalities has no memories of their change of personality when they change back to their normal personality.

Imagine that you are driving home from work and you see the aftermath of a car accident on the side of the road. You don't really want to look, you don't really want to see anything bloody or graphic, yet you take a glance. Before you can look away, you see a bloody and mangled dead body of a young girl on the grass beside the wrecked car.

You look away, and say "Oh God! Okay, I didn't see anything. I didn't even see that. I'm just going to drive home, make dinner, and just act like I never looked." You go home to your family. You have dinner, laugh with your family and have a normal evening. That evening your young daughter approaches you for a hug and tells you that she loves you. You suddenly break down and begin to cry. You grab your daughter and begin to scream how much you love her.

When you saw the young victim on the grass you were traumatized, and in order to deal with it you chose to "split" into another personality, someone who didn't see anything.

This may not be a perfect example of understanding this disorder, but if you do not suffer from this particular mental illness, it may be one of the only ways to help you relate.

In order to diagnosis dissociative personality disorder, the doctor asks the patient about their dissociative experiences and sometimes resorts to hypnosis or drugs to get at the patients' different personalities.

Finally, left untreated this disorder will continue. Medication is helpful in relieving some of the symptoms associated with the disorder, but it doesn't cure it. In most cases, treatments are long and difficult. However, with the right therapy, even the most disturbed patients can make serious improvements.

Learn more about this author, Pat Lunsford.
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