Multiple Personality Disorder has always intrigued me. I’m fascinated by it. And get incredibly annoyed when people use it as an example of schizophrenia, they’re completely different!

Schizophrenia is auditory or visual hallucinations (hearing/seeing things/people that aren’t there), or delusions of grandeur (I think there’s a ward in America with two Jesus’ and a Napoleon), or (another of my fascinations) catatonic, where people believe the devil is there and stop moving, completely, frozen for hours (the muscle pain that must follow that is crazy!).

MPD is pretty much what it says on the tin, a person has multiple personalities. Sometimes they know of the others existence, sometimes they don’t.

There’s a film called The Three Faces of Eve which I’ve not seen but want to (although apparently it’s not very true to the case) which is based on a real life case. A woman kept experiencing headaches and blackouts. It transpired there was her, Eve White (or so the psychologists called her, her real name was Chris Sizemore – she revealed herself as Eve in 1977), who knew nothing of any other personality, then there was Eve Black, who knew about Eve White and would do quite mischievous things when in control (from childhood onwards) and Eve White would be punished for these things despite having no recollection of them. Eve Black also preferred to go and see strangers when she was in control, and would pretend to be Eve White if she didn’t want to be recognised. There was also a third personality called Jane who came out later when Eve White was under hypnosis.

Eve White and Eve Black were given IQ tests, White got 110 and Black got 104. They then did Rorschach tests which showed that Black was healthier than White.

It seemed that Black didn’t like White. She would be very uncooperative, and at times the therapists realised that Black had actually been pretending to be cooperative and the things she’d said were actually detrimental to White’s progress.

White managed to take control more as she became aware of the existence of Black, she got better, was doing well at work, then the blackouts and headaches returned. Black denied responsibility and said she’d also been experiencing blackouts. The therapists put her under hypnosis and a new personality came out with a husky voice they’d not heard before. She seemed more responsible than Black and more confident and interesting than White.

The therapists thought Jane would be the best personality to get White’s life back on track. She knew about the other personalities but struggled to remember things from before her appearance. She could tell when Black had been lying, but couldn’t find a way to displace her or communicate through her.

Afterwards, White claimed that she had experienced a total of 22 personalities both before and after the treatment. She thought that the fragmentation of her personality could have been to protect her from things she couldn’t bear.

Thought for the day: A lot of people are misdiagnosed with MPD, it’s far more common in the USA than the UK, and women are more likely to be diagnosed (there’s a surprise), because sometimes therapists see what they want to see, instead of what’s there. But, just to weird people out, how many of us have MPD without necessarily knowing it? *cue spooky music*