What Is Dissociative Identity Disorder?

Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is the disorder when someone has a ''disruption of identity''. Originally called Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), this disorder means an individual has two or more personalities, with one active while the others lie dormant. This results in chunks of time being lost, for the main personality. The additional personalities can be any age or gender and tend to have unique behaviors, speech patterns, and actions. Doctors diagnose dissociative disorders based on a review of symptoms and personal history. A doctor may perform tests to rule out physical conditions that can cause symptoms such as memory loss and a sense of unreality (for example, head injury, brain lesions or tumors, sleep deprivation or intoxication).
Milligan, who claimed to have at least 10 or more different personalities, committed several felonies including armed robbery, he was arrested for three rapes on the Ohio State University campus in Athens, Ohio and whose defense was that he wasn’t the perpetrator; rather it was one of his alters. His lawyers pleaded insanity. Incredibly, he became the first person acquitted of major crimes for this reason, instead of spending a decade in mental hospitals. Many people such as doctors and psychiatrists wondered what caused Billy Milligan's condition. After doing careful and precise research they found out that Bill Milligan’s former stepfather Chalmer Milligan had physically and sexually abused Bill when he was young. It was his abuse which psychiatrists see as the key to Bill’s later behavior; it, therefore, plays a pivotal role in the story of Billy Milligan and his insanity plea. For Milligan’s defense, testimony from his brother, his mother and his sister backed up claims of physical and mental abuse by his
These personalities were each developed as a defense mechanism due to Billy's hard upbringing. For example, when he was young he would often get not only abused by his stepfather but also bullied by the neighborhood kids, and they would throw rocks and etc at him to tease him. Therefore each personality was used as a defense to protect himself from the things he couldn't quite handle alone.
For instance, in the movie SPLIT It was about a young man named Dennis who like billy also had a (DID) multi-personality disorder which causes him to kidnap three innocent teenage girls in his basement for quite some time. This movie can show great insight into how this mental illness is displayed in the human mind by giving us a visual aid of how one perceives or takes on the roles of these different