On page 60 of Be You and Live, I make mention of multiple personality disorder (MPD), also known as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). I am pointing out that people with this disease remain the same person regardless of which personality is dominant. However, I have just been reading in the New Scientist magazine (Issue 28 September, 2013) an article by Rosie Waterhouse titled, ‘The woman who had 48 personalities’. I’ll briefly summarise.
MPD rose to prominence in the early 1970’s with the publishing of a book called Sybil followed soon after by a movie of the same name. The character in Sybil was supposed to have had 16 personalities. From 1980 – 1998 there were some 40,000 reported cases of MPD in the U.S alone. The New Scientist article highlights a patient known as Carol, who had dozens of different personalities, including two children and an older lady who had recovered memories of sexual abuse. Recently however, MPD has come under a cloud – patients have successfully sued their doctors for implanting false memories even if unintentionally, and tests have shown how leading questions can result in false memories in some people. In the case of Carol, none of the personalities and memories of abuse were true – they had all been created by Carol’s psychiatrist. Carol tried to sue her psychiatrist, but her case was ruled to be out of time. Now, in the U.S. some have claimed that in the past 45 years there have been only three genuine cases of MPD. However, in Europe MPD is still a widely diagnosed disease.
Whether MPD disease exists or not is up to the experts to decide, but I think I can still argue that a person remains that same person, regardless of, which of many personalities, or aspect of a single personality, they may be displaying. It is also interesting to note how false memories and character can be produced simply through suggestion. Most of us are not vulnerable to suggestion to such a degree as many of the MPD patients may be, but we are all subject to suggestion on a daily basis – for example, just watch commercial TV for a while. So we must remain vigilant and realise that what we may think of as reality may be an illusion created in our own minds.