This is the new name for what used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder. Multiple Personality Disorder captured the popular imagination and inspired book and movie plots. In order to be diagnosed with DID, the person must have at least two distinct personalities, and may have many more. In half the cases, the patient has 10 or more! There are also the usual exclusions: the disorder cannot be accounted for by the effects of drugs or a general medical condition.  The symptoms typically start 6 or 7 years before the person is seen by a mental health professional. To be diagnosed, each of the two or more personalities has to assume control of the person's behavior at one time or another. DID also includes an aspect of Dissociative Amnesia; that is, the person with DID is unable to recall personal information, and the degree of forgetting is too great to be accounted for by normal processes. The different personalities forget different things, and the more dominant personalities typically remember more than the more passive personalities.

There is little solid information about the treatment of DID. It is clear that treatment is difficult, and that there are several reasons for extreme care in handling these patients. One problem is that it may not be obvious to the therapist for a long time that the patient even has DID. It is also possible that in some cases DID has been created or exaggerated by the therapist in these highly suggestible patients. Therapists, like laypersons, may be tempted to think these patients are frauds because when they make a dramatic switch from one personality to another it is as though they are putting on a dramatic performance. Finally, some DID patients are highly manipulative and quite clever, and they are very good at avoiding the recall of traumatic events (all or nearly all people with DID have a traumatic background that they are trying very hard to forget or turn over to another personality). One thing that most therapists agree on is that medication is not helpful unless the person has another mental disorder in addition to DID. A second point of agreement is that the goal of therapy is to integrate the personalities. 

Visit the web site of the International Society for the Study of Dissociation  for suggestions on guidelines for the treatment of DID.

Click here to access the web page of  a nonprofit organization devoted to disorders related to traumatic events; it also offers suggestions for treating DID.

                                                                                                                                Last updated  12/19/03