Divided Minds Essay Research Paper Divided MindsIdentity

Divided Minds Essay, Research Paper

Divided MindsIdentity Disorder will Jane Phillips, author of The Magic Daughter: A Memoir of Living with Multiple Personality Disorder talks about living with Multiple Personality Disorder. I was 40 years old and could not explain why a teddy bear had moved in with me. I would run into people I did not know, but greeted me like an old friend. Time was all out of order. Hours were missing from my days and sometimes days were missing from my weeks. I spent a lot of time alone in front of the mirror; the faces that looked back at me were not really mine. They all seem related but sometimes very young, very old, beautiful, wise, boyish, feminine, or mischievous. All of these thoughts made me feel as though I was crazy. I contemplated suicide many times (20). Truddi Chase author of Rabbit Howls, explains that these symptoms are part of an illness know as Dissociative Identity Disorder, or DID (x). Barbara Wickens, in Multiple Personalities: Some Victims Develop a Separate Reality, contends that many people are capable of dissociating, or losing a sense of reality to some extent, whether by daydreaming, becoming totally absorbed in a book, watching television, driving, or just staring off into space (1+). The difference between everyday dissociation and actually having Dissociative Identity Disorder involves many different factors. When people develop different personalities, also know as alters they are using a creative and very sophisticated way of coping with a situation their conscious mind does not want to deal with. People have been dealing with their problems this way for a long time. Beth McLeod, author of When The Mind Splits, explains that cases of dissociation were described by noted physicians in the late 1700s, and through the 1890s it was a fairly well recognized disorder. Then in 1920s schizophrenia was introduced to the medical world. Psychiatrists began lumping Multiple Personality Disorder into schizophrenia, a disorder in which the mind dissociates itself from the environment (1+). Schizophrenia is closely related to Multiple Personality Disorder, the most considerable difference is how the person dissociates themselves. In schizophrenia the person with the mental disease is dissociating from the actual environment or the surroundings, while patients with Multiple Personality Disorder are dissociating from themselves. Both disorders dissociate just in different ways. As the medical world began associating multiple personalities with schizophrenia Multiple Personality Disorder was all but forgotten. Most of these cases received little attention until the early 1980s. Chase states that in 1980 The Psychiatric Association recognized the condition of Multiple Personalities as a clinical and diagnostic category in their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, otherwise know as DSM IV. As more and more psychiatrists got involved with increased number of patients, they decided the name Multiple Personality Disorder was misleading name because the different personalities existed not in reality, but only in the mind of patients (iv). Jane Phillips, points out that in 1994, Multiple Personality Disorder was taken out of the DSM IV, and changed to be called Dissociative Identity Disorder, or DID (xiv). Dissociative Identity Disorder is a more appropriate name because instead of referring to an alter as a separate personality, it is referring to the alter as a branch of the patient’s basic self. All the different alters represent different components of the personality. Before there was any recognition of multiple personalities in DSM IV the public was aware of it through different high profile cases.The public feasts on the high profile cases of any mental disorder. Stories involving mental illnesses offer a view into altered states of consciousness, which are not everyday. McLeod explains the first high profile of DID was the story of Eve, the woman with 22 personalities. Eve was the subject of a book, and a movie. In 1957 Joanne Woodward took home the Academy Award for best actress for her performance in “The Three Faces of Eve” (1+). The public was well aware of multiple personalities before the disorder got any medical validity. McLeod goes on to explain another high-profile case described in the 1976 made-for-T.V. movie “Sybil”, Sally Field played a young woman who had 16 personalities. The movie was based on an actual woman who like most patients, developed DID after being severely abused as a child (1+).According to Wickens, studies have shown that more than 90 percent of DID patients have suffered extreme childhood abuse before the age of 12. “Some children use their ability to dissociate, or go into a self-induced hypnotic trance, as a way of blocking out the pain caused by the abuse they suffered” (1+). The brain will develop its own memory bank, and it will begin to function like a separate personality. Imagine this, a child who is sexually abused by his mother for the first time- the same mother who feeds him, clothes him, and reads him bedtime stories. The child does not understand or accept the behavior, which is horrifying, maybe even painful. The conscious part of his mind comes forward to hold the memory or pain. This way he is not crushed under the weight of what happened to him, and he can go about his life, going to school, or going out to play. According to McLeod, if the abuse becomes repeated the “dissociative