I'm doing research on this topic and I'm looking at possible possessions and other mumbo jumbo. Any insight on reliable sites?
Dissociative Identity Disorder is certainly interesting and absolute fodder for fiction. I did some research years ago for an employer with this article - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2719457/ And, here's a case study that I found a while back, useful info - http://www.rossinst.com/case_studies.html I don't know much about this one, but it looks promising - http://www.did-research.org/
You can also consult some trade publications. The DSM-5, http://www.dhss.delaware.gov/dsamh/files/si2013_dsm5foraddictionsmhandcriminaljustice.pdf Or Psychology today https://www.psychologytoday.com/conditions/dissociative-identity-disorder-multiple-personality-disorder I'm sure there are other professional journals, but those are the two primary ones I use in my research.
Oh My God! How come I didn't know about this. It's extremely interesting. this is exactly what i needed thank you.
That's a great movie, if you haven't seen it. That's probably the film that best scrubbed Sally Field of the 'Gidget' image.
Something to bear in mind; the kind of multiple personalities we see in fiction, where there are essentially two different people in the same head, are actually incredibly rare in the real world. I don't know if there's ever been a case where totally separate personalities with totally separate memories has actually been proven to exist. There's been people who claim that's the case but it's certainly very rare. Much more common (relatively speaking) are rather less interesting ones where we're talking more about rapid changes in personality with some level of memory loss between personalities, but they aren't different people. They are more like someone with severe bipolar disorder, one person with different 'modes' who may not remember everything they did in the other mode. That's certainly very distressing for them, as you can imagine, but they aren't jumping into a totally new life every time they switch. There's a reasonable number of therapists who argue that DID doesn't even really exist, as such, it's just other overlapping disorders together. If you have any mood disorder, combined with a memory disorder, then it's very easy to see how you could begin to believe there are multiple different people in your head when there isn't at all, there's just different versions of you that you can't always remember. Clearly that's a problem but it's not what we think of when we say multiple personalities. Being a mental disorder it's very hard to separate out people who are pretending, who are crazy in a different way and who are honestly suffering from DID. And there's lots of reasons why people would pretend as well. It can get them out of trouble or obligations, it makes lots of doctors very interested in you in a similar vein to Munchhausen's, gets you attention from society and can even make you money doing talk shows and lectures and stuff. The problem is that most people don't seek medical treatment for something unless it's stopping them functioning, but then seeking treatment becomes a good excuse for not functioning properly. And then there are lots of people who are crazy in other ways; who have schizophrenia or something similar where they hear voices and act irrationally; that to other people may look like multiple people when it's just one person. Equally if you have black outs or have specific psychological triggers then that can also look like multiple people. Finally if you are very paranoid and believe (say) that the aliens have been screwing with your brain then you might begin to believe that your own actions are caused by someone else living in your head. Finally there's the last group, who are also the smallest, who do have genuine DID but that may look to other people like something else. Remember, the classic fictional DID cases are certainly the minority, if not actually a fiction, so to someone else you might just appear to be a moody sod or someone with a really hair trigger temper. Even a doctor might look at you having no memory of a fight and say that it's fairly normal for people not to remember hyper stressful situations, especially where they had to hurt or kill someone. Add to that that most mental illness sufferers will try (consciously or not) to self-medicating before seeking help and that masks the real symptoms. If you don't know what you did last night but know that you were drinking then you won't chalk that up to a rare mental disorder. And drinking is very common as a way to self-medicate because it changes their personalities. Did you change to a different personality or did you just have a few drinks? When drugs get involved then it gets even muddier. When you are tripping tits it's not uncommon to forget your own name or indeed that the whole world exists. With any of those factors involved it's extremely challenging to decide what caused changes in personality and loss of memory. Are the problems in this patient the result of drug induced psychosis or are they an underlying problem that drugs are masking? And finally we get onto the most controversial parts of DID; children, abuse and doctor intervention. Not in any way to say that abuse victims, and abused children particularly, don't suffer through something unimaginably appalling. But it's not uncommon for genuine victims to seek attention and sympathy, including by pretending to have other problems. Equally, victims may chalk up some of their behavior during their abuse to someone else. Particularly if they were forced to help their abuser hurt other people or there were times that they enjoyed the abuse, they may rationalize that by saying it was someone else when really it was just them in an impossible situation. The latter of those (enjoying or consenting to their abuse) is fairly common for sex abuse victims particularly for children; it feels good to have someone touch you there. That in no way changes the fact that it was abuse, but we're biologically wired to like certain things. The result is extreme feelings of guilt and shame for the victims, feeling like there must be something wrong with them because sometimes they liked the attention or being touched in the middle of this horrendous situation. You can understand why those victims might prefer to call the part of themselves that enjoyed or even participated in the abuse as someone else rather than them. It helps them to rationalize what happened, to say the other little boy liked it but I definitely didn't. And then, well, children are not very reliable. Kids just make stuff up sometimes, both abuse and DID. Kids like attention and like feeling special. Claiming to either have been abused or to have DID (or both) means adults will fuss over them and give them an easy time at school. Especially since kids aren't very reliable as it is, and that adults instinctively want to help them, people will overlook mistakes in their story. And that gets onto the last point; therapist intervention in creating DID cases as well as creating abuse memories. If you look up the satanic panic of the 80's you'll find dozens of cases of 'suppressed memories' that therapists claimed to have uncovered that had no basis at all. The same has definitely happened with DID; with the therapist trying to 'draw out' other personalities and the patient reacting with what they think the therapist wants to hear. I don't want to say that certain therapists have deliberately tried to create DID cases but if they are predisposed to see it and ask leading questions (again, especially to children) then many patients will tell them what they want to hear. When you bring in things like hypnosis then it's easy to see how you can just fabricate DID from nowhere. Once a patient believes they have multiple personalities then they are predisposed to reinforce that, seeing every gap in memory or change in personality (even when it makes sense) as another identity rather than just normal life. This is the biggest reason why some therapists say that DID simply doesn't exist. Because there is no systematic way to diagnose it and no really strong definition of what counts or what causes it. The link between abuse or trauma and DID has been challenged, with opponents arguing that therapists have gone looking for abuse in DID patients and found what they wanted to see. Add to that all of the reasons why people might just pretend to have DID and you can understand why some therapists would rather avoid using the term. I think that's going too far and that DID does exist, but it's important to remember that it's a spectrum disorder and one that we don't really understand well. Suffice to say that DID is quite contentious and it's not really what we normally perceive it to be. Most of the fictional forms of DID (where say a serial killer is a normal personality and it's their alter ego that kills people) are more based on the stories told by serial killers. Many of them tell these kinds of stories, but clearly that's self serving; because it gets them off the hook for having hacked women apart. Depictions of killer alter egos are very cool and interesting, because that makes for a serial kill who we can sympathize with, most of the time, but I don't believe that there has been a confirmed case of a killer with DID. The problem is that, much like with schizophrenia (which isn't at all like the fictional portrayals either; it's hellish having schizophrenia) the people suffering from it are genuinely almost incapable of functioning by themselves. Can you imagine trying to hold down a job when you can't remember the meeting you had yesterday? How about working on a building site when you can't remember how to safely operate the tool in your hand? Simple things like cooking and cleaning become very challenging; just remembering to buy food and pay bills and not trashing your house are extremely difficult under those circumstances. Suffice to say that most genuine sufferers are more likely to be in an institution than to be killing people. It's possible that they can live successfully alone, but it'd be very very hard for them to not see there is something wrong with them. They might not trust doctors or be really paranoid, but barring some exceptional circumstances they will have to seek treatment just to function. Edit - If you don't believe that people do just make up multiple personalities then google the phrase "headmates". There's a community of people who claim to have (often very extravagant) multiple personalities, including fictional characters, historical figures, tress, plants, shrubs and gods. They talk about how wonderful and special it is to have friends in their heads and the challenges of those different personalities taking charge at various times. If you click [here] you can see one such page. And while I don't want to call them weirdos pretending really hard that they are special I suspect that you will quickly begin to get that impression for yourself. I've seen things like people claiming that one of their alter egos is themselves someone with multiple personalities; how they can tell the difference I have no idea but they claim that this is completely legitimate and that 'plurality' is a wonderful gift.
Would you say that having two or more personas come through at certain times is DID? So if the person starts acting, dressing, talking and even looking like somebody else. That they're almost mimicking that person, how would you call that? I'm just asking because one of the MC in my novel has this problem. which led her to commit abuse, rape and murder. all while claiming she doesn't know anything about that.
That sounds like they've had a psychotic break and if that's the angle you are going for I'd more lean towards that as the explanation rather than DID. Psychosis comes with profound personality changes and changed perceptions of reality (both subtle and overt) which could easily lead them to murder someone, and it's not uncommon for psychotic patients to not remember what happened during a psychotic episode. This won't give you two separate characters as such, but it can be quite Jekyll and Hyde. There's the Dr Jekyll side of the character who is just a normal person doing normal person stuff, and then there's Mr Hyde when they hit a psychotic episode and suddenly they are incredibly paranoid and unpredictably aggressive and may fixate on a person or thing as the cause and be driven to just destroy it however they can. If they had, say, some trauma in their lives from their mother, then they could easilly hear their mothers voice in their head telling them how much of a failure they are, then see her face on a random woman and be driven to kill them. They are still people with their normal intelligence though, so they can do anything a normal people could, if they thought that made sense. They could certainly dress up and act like someone else, particularly if they are close to this person and feel that mimicking them would help get the voices to stop (say, if they believe that it's someone beaming messages into their head, they could disguise themselves to try and escape it). It has to make sense to them but as long as it does then there's no reason why they couldn't. There are some downsides. Psychotic episodes aren't separate people or even separate personalities. It's the same personality put under incredible strain. They are living through a period where they can't tell what's real and what's not, including hallucinations and so forth. They also get some very scary disturbances in through pattern, like feeling unable to control their own thoughts and making weird leaps in logic that only make sense to them. Normally it's a sort of groping at straws kind of logic, anything to make the voices stop, and in a fleeting moment they think this cat is making the voices happen and then don't think if that's plausible or not (remember, they can't necessarily trust their senses on anything so it's very hard to see if things make sense) they just go and kill the cat because maybe it'll help. So they aren't truly separate people, but obviously being put under that kind of psychological distress really changes how they think and act. Particularly given their paranoia it's uncommon that they are able to act without people knowing they are crazy although I'm sure it's possible. That just covers psychosis but there's other possibilities. Most severe mental illnesses come with 'good days' and 'bad days' and those look like two very different people. You could easily write them as someone suffering from some complex delusion that they are this other person and have a mission from god to kill people. Those kinds of things don't come and go quickly, but it's definitely stuff that's happened before. If it were me I'd write someone who is just this, someone who is suffering from a protracted delusion or semi-psychotic state, who can make the voices go away by killing people, but it doesn't kick them out of the episode, just leaves her feeling normal again for a while, but slowly the voices come back and start controlling her thoughts and making her dress and act a certain way and finally she lashes out and kills someone to get herself back. And then at some point she gets some kind of treatment and gets out form the episode and then she can't remember anything of it after. And then she could snap again at some point and have the cycle start again. I think it works better than DID, both because it has some more psychological credibility and because it gives you more stuff to explore. To me I think it's a bit too shallow to say that she has another person in her who happens to be a murderer and that like killing and that's that. I think if she's psychotic then you can play with her perceptions and make it all about her struggling against the condition and reality and just so desperately trying to free her brain from it and that's something with a lot of depth to explore.
It does sound interesting, changing her diagnosis. I will research deeper into psychotic breaks. Now, When I say Another person living inside her, I meant, that she has moments where she is completely different. In Example, the character is friends with a very small circle... while her "alter ego" doesn't like people. When she's in that state her friends become the enemy. when they're talking to her she will, cuss them out, or just block them from her mind. she hates people in fact. Just one person is allowed to talk to her and that's her boyfriend the MC. which both personalities love. if the main "person" hates someone, her alter ego heightens that feeling making her hurt or even might wish to kill them when she is Her alter ego. her normal self-doesn't have the stomach to hurt anybody. she does hear voices, she is in some sort of trance when she hears them, blocking everything else out. But she also talks to this voices and tries to reason with them. when it comes unbearable, that's when she lets her Alter Ego, take over and finally feel control. I guess you could say she feels safer with her around. she's not scared of getting hurt or of people. she finds the feelings of peace she needs when her alter ego in control. Can a person have a psychotic break and also have DID? Edit: I was also looking at Schizophrenia. Which has the majority of the symtoms my character is expiriecing.
As a retired Mental Health professional, I want to "second" the very sound advice that you've gotten from @LostThePlot. Schizophrenia is a psychotic disorder (the most common), but you'll want to be careful here because individuals with schizophrenia often have profound impairments in their social relationships that would impact your portrayal of your character "between" psychotic breaks. The book/movie/story "Sybil" has been totally debunked, and, as noted, DID is a very controversial diagnosis. In the 90's it, and books and movies about multiples were very much in vogue. So much so that it got to be a bit cliched on made-for-TV movies. I personally think that writing a believable story about somebody with a complicated psychological condition is very difficult to do. Kudos to you for doing some research b/4 you get too far in. BTW, people who are bipolar may experience psychotic breaks when in a manic state. Where I think you begin skating on thin ice is the whole one part of the personality doesn't know the bad stuff another part is doing ("blackout") stuff. Good luck!
I am knees deep in info, I mean I even have a folder of sites where I can go and research, read and learn. Hey but it's so hard because as I get to reading it my eyes go somewhere else. It's not that I'm not interested it's just that it bores me.
