Presidential Editorial: The Facts and Fantasies of Dissociation

For many years, I have had a Google News alert set up for “dissociative identity disorder.” Google automatically sends me a daily e-mail notifying me of global news items that mentioned DID in the last 24 hours. Ever since I subscribed, the same pattern has been evident: the majority of news items mentioning DID do not involve science, mental health or crime reporting, as you might expect, but are instead summarizing the plots of television shows and movies. It seems that, in the public sphere, DID features more often as a fictional plot device than it does as a factual condition experienced by approximately 1% of the population. Too often, these portrayals of DID are the hackneyed pantomimes of “split personalities” (see the many justified critiques of M. Night Shamalan’s “Split” movies, e.g., (ISSTD, 2017)) that overlook much of what is unique about the life histories of people with DID. So many stories are told about DID that are not of DID. Many if not most of these shows and movies continue to obfuscate what DID reveals about the development of the human infant in conditions of hostility and adversity. They are unable to represent the substratum of suffering and malevolence that makes DID a necessary adaptation for too many. Awareness of DID and its fictionalization have long gone hand-in-hand. Even as dissociation became the subject of scientific study in the late 19 century, it was a novel – Robert Lewis Stevenson’s (1886) book The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – that would bring the possibility of multiple personalities to public attention (Simeon & Loewenstein, 2009). Throughout the 20 century, popular and dramatic (although not fictional) accounts of multiple personalities such as The Three Faces of Eve (Thigpen & Cleckley, 1957) and Sybil (Schreiber, 1973) laid the groundwork for both public and clinical understandings (and misunderstandings). Even the backlash against the dissociative disorders field can be understood as a fictionalizing movement, attempting to consign the condition back to the realm of the imagination (Cheit, 2022; Conway & Pilgrim, 2022; McMaugh & Middleton, 2022). People with DID have been routinely accused of mimicking the condition based on books and movies, while children disclosing the kinds of abuses that give rise to DID have been labeled as watching too many horror movies (Campbell, 1995). Today, the relationship between the facts and fantasies of dissociation continues to be debated with the rise of children and young people self-diagnosing as DID based on their immersion in social media, JOURNAL OF TRAUMA & DISSOCIATION 2023, VOL. 24, NO. 1, 1–7 https://doi.org/10.1080/15299732.2022.2157620