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Amanda Desorcy
Penny Sobocinski
ENG 1101
23 November 2018
Imagine you, by yourself, sitting in a coffee shop drinking your favorite drink and
just thinking to yourself, almost like you are having a conversation in your head. For
people with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), this is a very real conversation,
possibly between many different people/personalities inside their own brain. According
hard to even imagine what it is like to never really be alone in inside of your own body.
People living with DID go through this multiple times every day and are told to act
normal. Which brings me to a few questions: What is DID? What causes DID? What are
alters? Is it genetic? What are the symptoms of DID? Can it be treated or cured? And
lastly, Why is there so much stigma around DID? If more Americans educated
According to Timothy J. Legg, PhD, CRNP. DID can be caused by many things, one of
the most common things that does cause it is sexual trauma at a young age. The kind of
damage the brain of that child or young person goes through when there is a sexual
trauma is immense. The brain hasn’t developed enough to fully understand the events
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that occurred. The brain then starts creating new personalities inside the person’s own
body. These personalities, also known as “alters”, can take many roles. For example, it
is very common that there is a child alter if there was a childhood sexual trauma. This is
because the brain associated the trauma with the age and creates an alter that maybe
never had to go through that, or that would protect the person from that trauma. The
same process can occur in adults as well. If a traumatic trauma occurs it can become
Alters are unique to everyone who suffers with Dissociative Identity Disorder.
There is no set amount of alters and not set demographic. There can be an average
range of one alter to twenty. Some of the most interesting thing about alters is all the
may have different ages, for instance much younger or older; a different gender to the
physical body; different names, or no name; different roles or functions, either related to
daily life or to trauma; different attitudes, and preferences, e.g, in food, or dress a
different perception of their appearance, for e.g., different hair or skin color, body shape;
different memories, e.g., some may remember trauma or events in daily life that others
medication responses, allergies, plasma glucose levels in diabetic patients, heart rate,
blood pressure readings, galvanic skin response, muscle tension, laterality, immune
disagree with each other and control one another. Just like how it is true that different
people disagree and try to hold power over one another. It is also common that an alter
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is able to disown the “host” body and instead of calling it “my body” the phrase becomes
“the body” or “our body”. The main purpose of an alter is to protect/hide the memory of
the trauma that occurred from the host’s own memory. It is common for the host to
never know what happened to them. The brain does such a good job covering and
protecting itself from feeling that pain that it takes intensive therapy to ever reach that
memory.
While many believe that DID is genetic and can be passed on and that people
with DID should not have children, it is not genetic. Some people living with DID should
not have children due to mental instability, but others may be just fine and able to cope
with it. DID is not caused by faulty genes or chemical imbalances in the brain so it does
not affect the host in a negative way in a heredity aspect. General symptoms that will
affect someone with DID can include, but are not limited to: “a sense of "losing time”,
result of alternate identities being in control), having distressing dreams and memories,
DID is one of the many mental disorders that can be treated with the possibility of
the altars coming back into one main personality for the body. Treatments can include
Meditation and relaxation techniques, Clinical hypnosis, and Medication. Each of these
have their own specific way of treating and are decided upon by a medical doctor. It is not
100% guaranteed that a person will be cured from treatment, but generally learn more
about themselves, their alters, and the event that caused the disorder.
DID carries a lot of stigma. People are believed to be scary or unpredictable, which
can be completely untrue. Many people live completely normal lives with families and jobs
with DID. The media holds a lot of the responsibility with creating this stigma. The news
has always had tendencies to exaggerate stories and have done so hundreds of times in
stories about people with DID. They portray these people, who just want to be like
everyone else, in a negative scary manor. An example of this would be the movie Split. The
movie was about a man with DID who kidnapped three girls for one of the altars, known as
“The Beast” to feed on. The movie is categorized as a rated R horror film. It causes people
to look at people with DID as they looked at the man in the movie. If more people would
do their own research, even watching YouTube videos made by people with DID, you can
easily see that they are desperately trying to show people that they are normal people.
They deserve to be treated the same as anyone else and just want to fit into society just
Overall, DID is a mental disorder that is caused, not passed down in your family
genes, It can have some noticeable symptoms to severe symptoms. In most cases, people
diagnosed with DID seek therapy of some sort to help them. DID can be treated and cured
in some cases. It is not a scary disorder, unlike how some media have portrayed it to be,
Works Cited
www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/321462.php.
traumadissociation.com/alters.
disorder-multiple-personality-disorder.