While Multiple Personality Disorder has enjoyed a long history as a compelling plot device in popular fiction, it hasn't enjoyed much in the way of
scientific support as a naturally occurring condition (as opposed to a condition cultivated in the course of backward and incompetent "treatment"). The theory that "repressed memories" can be drawn into surface consciousness by way of hypnosis, or other 'recovered memory therapies', suffers from the stain of a long history of extremely improbable recovered memory narratives -- from alien abduction, past-life recall, Satanic Ritual Abuse, and Government Mind-Control paranoia. These clearly confabulatory legends of conspiracy culture, said to be supported by memories discovered in the course of "therapy", are transparently the product of the "therapist's" delusional assumptions contaminating their client's recall. (Those who specialize in alien abduction, for example, always seem to have clients who are repressing memories of extraterrestrials, and not abuse at the hands of cultists. Likewise, the other way round, for those specializing in "cult abuse".)
Nonetheless, Multiple Personality Disorder, now renamed "Dissociative Identity Disorder" still remains a hotly debated topic, with many quacks still defending the legitimacy of recovered memory therapies.
Recently, Orphia Nay, head of the Australasian Skeptics Forum, and contributor to Dysgenics.com, posted a series of interviews with people who had, at one time or another, been diagnosed with Multiple Personality Disorder.
Each interview subject is asked the same series of questions, and what emerges is a compelling portrait of mental heath malpractice and folly. When emotionally vulnerable, many of the MPD diagnosed were led to believe, all at once, that they had multiple minds within them, and that these minds were concealing memories of horrific abuse waiting to be known.
As one interviewee, Karen Wallace, from Australia, describes:
It has taken almost four years to re-train myself to stop waiting for a personality to suddenly be revealed. Once the relationship with my psychologist deteriorated, I started to realise that I did not have to act or play a role for anyone, including those people who continued to believe that I had DID. Fear kept me believing that I had these personalities: my therapist was persistent in reassuring me that I would need to have all of my personalities integrated to be free, to be normal, to live as a functional human being. For years I was terrified that there might have been some deeply traumatised child alters trapped in memories and that I would always be a dysfunctional woman with the possibility of an alter suddenly creating chaos at any random moment if these alters decided to appear. Self analysis of my own behaviours and thoughts was the catalyst in helping me find that certainty that I had never had any personalities. I became friends with a new social circle of educated people who could explain in detail the processes that I had become entrapped in with my therapist and since then, I have no fear. I never genuinely believed I had personalities nor did I suddenly stop believing. The fear that I could be mentally unwell and that there was a possibility that my psychologist was correct kept me from simply admitting the truth.
Interview 1:
Jeanette Bartha, USA
Interview 2:
Roma Hart, Canada
Interview 3:
Sonja Karels, Netherlands
Interview 4:
Kim (a pseudonym), USA
Interview 5:
Karen Wallace, Autralia
People interested in current scandals related to this old, debunked, therapeutic fraud are encouraged to also check out this recent piece in Pacific Standard by Ed Cara: http://www.psmag.com/...