Review
It's difficult to fully comprehend the challenges and frustrations of living with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). It seems an impossible disorder to cope with – blacking out and waking up in unfamiliar places and situations, not having any memory of your different personalities' actions, people constantly blaming you for things you never said or did, having no sense of continuity – it's maddening. But what's truly scary is realizing that the brain's decision to split is actually its way of protecting a person from unbearably traumatic events – most commonly, childhood sexual abuse.
In her memoir,
All of Me: How I Learned to Live with the Many Personalities Sharing My Body, Kim Noble (a name given to her at birth that she has now learned to respond to) describes, with great honesty and a bit of dramatic flair, her experiences living with DID. As a...
Beyond the Book
According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) "is a dissociative disorder involving a disturbance of identity in which two or more separate and distinct personality states (or identities) control the individual's behavior at different times. When under the control of one identity, the person is usually unable to remember some of the events that occurred while other personalities were in control. The different identities, referred to as alters, may exhibit differences in speech, mannerisms, attitudes, thoughts, and gender orientation. The alters may even differ in 'physical' properties such as allergies, right-or-left handedness, or the need for eyeglass prescriptions. These differences between alters are often quite striking."
In...
