Dissociative Identity Disorder and The Isolation of Plurality
This is a featured guest article graciously written by Echo Harris. Echo can be found on Instagram: @echoharrisphoto and their website www.echoharrisphoto.com
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“This body is not yours,” words I have repeated to myself so often that it’s not so much a reminder as an affirmation. This is not how I look, what I sound like, or how my skin feels. As a person with DID or Dissociative Identity Disorder, I experience this feeling often, and it is merciless. I look in the mirror and see a stranger copying my every move. Oftentimes it’s not ever close, in terms of resemblance to how I see myself. I often hear streams of consciousness besides my own and none of them quite match my appearance. This is of the many factors that play into my daily life: someone with DID, a heavily stigmatized condition, and that stigma causes the affected person to be isolated and ostracized.
Consequences of Sharing
The Consequences of sharing a DID diagnosis with others keep many from discussing it with those who don’t have DID, commonly called singlets or non-systems in the DID community. This is much more common than those who are open about their diagnosis and often their trauma. Because DID is a way of processing trauma as a young child, hiding a condition like this for many years takes a mental toll in its own right; no one is ever able to get to know you as yourself because you can’t be yourself around anyone.
Those with DID who share the diagnosis will often lose friendships, as I did, or have damaged family relations. Another possible consequence is outright ostracization; people often do not treat you like a human being if they do remain in your life. Personally, many friendships of mine had a fundamental shift after I started being open about my DID; people I knew and loved stopped returning texts, I wasn’t invited to their events and my social life stagnated.
Stigma in the Media
Hollywood movies like Split (2016) portray DID patients as murderers waiting to happen which is not the case, many people with DID lead healthy lives, and are often the victims of abusive situations themselves. The main cause of DID is believed to be childhood trauma. It can also occur after medical procedure that was exceptionally stressful and traumatizing, it does not need to be a conventional idea of child abuse. Films and media that show people with DID as murderous villains are doing real harm as many people with DID have lived through real horrors.
Hollywood’s fascination with multiple people in one body actively harms a population that is very vulnerable. Portrayal of DID in the is often misleading at best. The presence of the condition in horror movie antagonists and, rarely, anti-heroes, has an impact on real people. Leading people to believe they have knowledge on a condition they don’t have any knowledge of at all and portraying fiction as fact. This trope makes it frightening to be open with others leading me to my next point.
Social Difficulties
Maintaining friendships and romantic relationships with this kind of stigma is already a challenge, but many people with DID, myself included, have memory issues. These memory issues make communication and keeping appointments a challenge. This coupled with the differing alters, a common term for different personality states that may or may not be present within a person with DID, not necessarily feeling the same thing about the same person and it can make friendships very unstable. I have had difficulty holding down a job for many of these reasons as well. The presence of a condition like DID is often enough to cause the affected person severe distress and that makes work of any typical kind challenging in the best of times.
The difficulties with living as someone with DID are many, but could be helped with some societal changes such as normalizing the use of frequent changes of names and pronouns, and of course improving mental health systems and increasing access to treatment. If you would like to read more about DID I recommend looking at the following sources.
Check out the National Alliance of Mental Illness for more information about DID.
