Hello internet,

Damn it has been way too long since I last ranted here on this blog. I guess for some time now flowery language and mixed up emotions have been a good way to express how I feel but today, well today I think I’m gonna have to be a little bit more direct.

Dissociative identity Disorder.

Or how a majority of the world’s populations knows it, Multiple Personality Disorder.

Now for those of you who do not know what this disorder is, to put it in simple terms, it is a disorder in which due to repetitive abuse (mental, emotional, physical or sexual), a person develops different identities.

My first encounter with the words multiple personality disorder was a horror/thriller film, in which a woman loses herself in a story and therefore creates another identity that is this woman she has heard of this story. As a child, I was genuinely just terrified of the whole ordeal and props to the woman for acting so brilliantly as a crazy woman. But now that I’ve grown older and gone back to these movies and several other movies that depict this disorder, I’ve come to realize that’s not really how dissociative identity disorder works.

Of course, back when this movie was made suffering from a mental illness was considered equivalent to being a person that needed to be locked away and so clarity on this subject matter is very iffy.

But even otherwise, while much research has been done on dissociative identity disorder, psychologists are still nowhere close to truly affirming of disproving its existence. The topic is constantly on debate and this makes life for people who suffer from this disorder very difficult. To put this into perspective, you know those moments in life where your parents have told you not to eat the chocolate cake but your sibling did and then you get blamed for it and no matter how much proof you have that your sibling was the one who ate the cake, they don’t believe you. Ya, that’s just a teenie tiny bit of what it feels like to be a person suffering from multiple personality disorder.

A very big misconception that people have about DID is that the other identities want to harm the more dominant identity or wants to harm people that have wronged the dominant identity. Not all personalities that develop are violent in nature and the most basic purpose of their development is to deal with the trauma the dominant identity wanted to be disassociated from.

These “alters” are very different or very similar to the dominant identity and they can both be more violent or less violent than the identity. Each alter has its own sexuality, gender, race, gestures,  and manners of talking to other people, etc. And in recent times, it’s been found that they can even have different physiological systems.

November 2015, a woman who suffered from dissociative identity disorder who had been considered medically blind after an accident she incurred at the age of 20, could see in her alter that was a teenage boy.
Do you know how miraculous that sounds? A whole lot.
Her mind enabled her to create an identity that could give her back her vision, which would mean repairing damage and trauma in a physiological system within the same person.

That is fucking amazing.

The problem is with such debates about the existence of this disorder, people that suffer from it often times do not get the best care available and get very limited and biased opinions about what their disorder entails.

This is harmful and horrible because it can lead to them developing several misconceptions about themselves and going to other unreliable sources to find information about their disorder. And let’s be honest if we wrote down our symptoms for any issue on the internet, we are bound to be dying in some form or the other, which is why I guess I’m here feeling passionate af, writing a blog post on DID.

We all know by now that the need for awareness of mental illnesses is highly required and yes to a very large degree we are getting there, we are slowly removing the stigmatization surrounding mental illnesses. GO US! GO HUMANITY!

But that doesn’t mean we still don’t require it and I may not have a lot of people who are reading this, but at least the few that I am educating, please spread awareness, be educated, be informed.

Dissociative identity disorder is said to affect 1% of the world’s population if we take that as 7 billion people, that is still 70 million people that are suffering from DID and possibly not getting the proper care or knowledge about their disorder. I know it’s not as high as some of the other ones which are primarily in focus such as depression or anxiety, but none the less; 70 million people.

70 million people who could benefit from you being more informed about what the disorder is, how one should react to their switches, and overall awareness of their existence. To let them know this fight is not alone and that even though you may not personally suffer from it, you will help to make their lives easier, just as you might hold the door for a man with a broken leg.

Anyways,

That’s all I had for today.

Pseudonym signing out.