At the beginning of this assignment, I was very unsure about where my research would lead. I wasn’t expecting to find much to support my thesis, but I ended up scraping together some solid evidence. My subject is very controversial in the psychology field, especially because of all of the fakers and the absurdity of the disorder in the first place. Tackling this subject meant searching for evidence that might not even exist yet. As I worked through this assignment, I started to realise how tough of a subject this was, but also how much evidence there was that actually supported my thesis. By my last blog post, I had learned a lot of new things about dissociative identity disorder and became more sure of my research. Doing the research and immersing myself in the subject had a huge part in changing my thoughts on my subject. My thesis stayed the same throughout this assignment, and I was very determined to prove my theory.

I really enjoyed making these blogs. I tried not to rush my posts, even though they were extremely overdue. The blog aspect of this assignment was very fun and gave me the opportunity to explore a new media. It even inspired me to create my own personal blog, which I made over winter break to document my mental health.

If this assignment was a paper instead, I would cry. I cannot craft a thesis for the life of me. With a paper, my writing would have to be formal and organized. With this blog, I was able to be more informal and relaxed with how I presented my findings. I think other assignments would be more fun and easy if they were in blog form, but it would quickly become boring and hard to keep track of everything. Blogs are fun and all, but being able to create a well written paper is more beneficial to our education. For our 6-10 page paper, I feel a blog better suits the assignment compared to a paper. Making blogs about unsolved crimes or conspiracy theories is perfect.

My procrastination was my downfall. That would be the main thing I’d change if I had to do this assignment again. The other things I’d change have to do with my blog’s homepage: better organization, clearer pictures, page music, and a different layout/theme. Other than that, I think I did pretty well. I (eventually) met the required amount of blog posts, with each one being in-depth and thorough, and had little to no grammatical or spelling errors. My sources are also hyperlinked. I’d like to think my final reflection is well written too. Overall, I would give myself an A+ based on the rubric’s criteria. Taking into consideration the teeny tiny fact that this is about a month late, my actual grade is most definitely lower. But, according to just the rubric, I’d get an A+ because late point deductions aren’t mentioned.

“DID I Ask?”

Yes, yes you did. Or was it you? Or you? Or you? Maybe it was you. Perhaps it was all of you. It could possibly be none of you. Are you even the real you?

Despite what you might think, dissociative identity disorder isn’t a ʎʞɹıuq ɹo uuɟ disorder. It is a very scary and debilitating disorder if not recognised and dealt with. There is much we don’t know about the disorder. What we know so far is that the mind essentially fractures and dissociates into different identities. This is caused by long-term severe childhood trauma. These identities, or alters, each have a role and come out when needed. They can be combined through therapy.

Do you remember asking now?

I interviewed multiple people on TikTok who claim to have dissociative identity disorder and cross referenced their claims and experiences with people who are clinically diagnosed by medical professionals*. I tried to enter these interviews with an open mind and no bias or prejudice against possible fakers so I could best gather a neutral outlook of DID portrayal**. Most of the TikTokers were eager to participate in this interview and happily answered all of my questions***. Some even had neat little carrds with their information and suggested I use their TikToks to see more information. Each person was given the same five basic questions to begin the interview: What are your demographics (age, race, gender, location, etc)? What is DID to you? Are you diagnosed? How long have you known you had DID? How many alters do you have? With each question, I delved deeper into each person and their specifics. I spoke with some people about their trauma, or lack thereof, while others avoided the topic. The lack of trauma was a huge red flag, but I still entertained their answers with an impartial view.

One of the first things I noticed was how the majority of the TikTokers claiming to have DID are AFAB (assigned female at birth). It is statistically proven that women are more likely to have DID than men, but not by this large of a margin. The vast majority were also white, and all of them were located in the United States. Almost everyone was under the age of 18. While the symptoms of DID are able to be seen early on, most diagnoses are made when the patient is around their 30s-40s. This is also due to the patient not being aware of their alters or able to communicate with them in any way. Unlike real DID patients, these TikTokers are immediately aware of their alters and consciously able to communicate and switch between themselves on command. Every single person I interviewed shared this impossible ability.

When asked what DID meant to them, most of the TikTokers replied with the standard definition, but they all added some type of twist to it to fit their narrative. Those who didn’t give the medical criteria claimed that the known definition was wrong, mostly in the sense of needing trauma for DID to form. They claimed trauma wasn’t necessary for DID to form, and some even went so far as to educate me on how systems are formed on purpose. With the ones who acknowledged that trauma is an integral part to forming DID, only a few ignored the question and moved on, while the rest gave me some insight on their experiences. Most of the trauma was from abusive family members/significant others. A couple of them told me their trauma is on-going and/or recently started. This was told to me out loud in said abusive household with said abusive family members nearby. In one case, the TikToker said their trauma came from their birth. Not rebirth, or religious birth, or metaphorical birth, but their actual “Hello World!” birth. Their explanation of this trauma was that they’d spent time in an incubator and their baby mind suffered from it and kept that suffering in their mind. This is another impossible thing because no one remembers their birth.

About half of the TikTokers told me they were professionally diagnosed, while the other half said they were self-diagnosed. The half who are diagnosed are lying because they are all under the age of 18, and no respectable medical professional would diagnose someone who is so very clearly faking the disorder for attention. The self-proclaimed DID sufferers all gave me the same two reasons for why they diagnosed themselves: getting a real diagnosis is too hard/expensive and “doctors are wrong, I’m right!” One person stood out to me when I asked them the diagnosis question because we were in a video chat for the interview. I noticed they were in their fully furnished room with the door open, wearing expensive headphones, had a full gaming setup in the background, wore multiple piercings, and spoke very loudly. Imagine my disbelief when they told me, “I live in an abusive household and I don’t have money. I cannot get a diagnosis.” With the amount of freedom they seem to have, their household doesn’t look very abusive or poor. While it’s wrong to assume things and judge a book by its cover, this book’s cover is very telling. Someone in an abusive household would not loudly proclaim their accusations of abuse within such close proximity to the alleged abuser.

Another red flag I noticed was the inconsistencies in their discovery of DID. All of them claim to have discovered it within the past 3-4 years, which lines up with the Covid lockdowns causing many people to become chronically online. Correlation doesn’t always mean causation, but in this case, this heavy correlation is definitely equal to causation. Each person gave me textbook experiences. “People say I act like different people at times.” “I don’t remember doing things.” “I end up in random places.” Reality TV shows are less scripted than them. These memory loss realizations were followed by quick Google searches and a hasty answer: Dissociative identity disorder. Each “diagnosis” was found shortly after the supposed lapses in memory. DID takes time to be diagnosed. The average patient spends seven years in psychiatric care before they’re finally diagnosed. A diagnosis is not discovered overnight during a Redbull-fueled Discord chat. One might brush off this one instance as a rare occurrence; however, it is everything but. The ones who told me about their abuse were still with their abusers, yet had no proof or indicators of the abuse other than their word and their disorder.

The range of alters spanned from 2-800 or more. This large span would usually be a good thing, except in this case where it’s impossible. Multiple people had well over 100 alters when the average alter count is 10. While it’s not impossible to have more than ten, it is impossible to have a number in the hundreds. Those who claimed to have this large amount of alters couldn’t even provide a list of names, stating that some alters “haven’t made themselves known,” and it’s their “best guess” on how many alters exist in their head. Unknown alters are generally what all alters are in the beginning, but once the disorder is known, the alters are documented as they come to light. It’s rare for a new alter to form once the patient is in adulthood or after the abuse has stopped, and it’s even more rare for multiple alters to be unknown once the patient is aware of the disorder. With the smaller amounts of alters, it was no surprise that most of them were based on already existing people and characters, called fictives/factives or introjects. They are one of the rarest types of alters but are the easiest to make. Some of the fictive alters argued that they were their own original person despite being suspiciously similar to popular characters. An overwhelming amount of those alters were derived from newly popularized characters, like members of the DreamSMP, Wednesday, My Hero Academia, Poppy’s Playtime, and Bluey****. I met a large amount of alters from these fandoms, mostly from the DreamSMP who were named Dream/Clay, Tommy, Wilbur, or Techno. While fictives don’t necessarily always align completely with their source character, each one’s personalities and attributes rarely differed between alters sharing the same name*****. Some of these alters appeared days, or even hours, after the characters were made public, which is impossible because fictives are formed when a young child cannot process the trauma they are going through and instead internalizes it in the form of a character they watched while growing up, such as Elmo or Timmy Turner.

Trauma is one of two major defining traits of DID. Without trauma, the disorder would not happen. Three of the TikTokers tried to tell me they had DID without trauma. I already knew all of them were faking, but for them to be so blatantly ignorant about the disorder is angering. All of them insisted the diagnosis criteria was wrong in needing trauma. With the rest of the TikTokers, their trauma stemmed from multiple sources. Some refused to elaborate on their trauma, but those who did were very open about it. Their trama ranged from a single experience to constant, repeated abuse by family members. A common trauma source was abusive parents. About two thirds were related to parental abuse that was still on-going. As they explained, they shared their timeline of trauma. A concerning amount were recent and not from childhood. This does not fit the diagnosis criteria. Another appalling discovery I made was the existence of alter trauma that never happened to the body******. The trauma came from either source material, if they were fictives, or were from “past lives and internal experiences.” Those internal experiences were in reference to the headspace, which is where these fakers all claim the alters congregate and converse freely. Five people said they had alters physically fighting in the headspace, and it resulted in alter deaths. Alters cannot die or disappear; however, they can go dormant for an amount of time or be merged/unified with another alter. Integration is a common therapy for DID patients that focuses on working to combine all of the alters till each dissociated part is put back into one whole personality.

*Please refer to my homepage to read about the diagnosed DID patients. Links to each person are located at the top of my blog under each of their names. I will not be discussing my comparison here.

**My analysis of the interviews after the fact is definitely biased.

***To avoid any harassment or unwanted attention, people will only be referred to by their chosen names, if at all. TikTok usernames/handles will not be mentioned. System names will be shown.

****DreamSMP is a Minecraft roleplay group created by YouTuber Dream and includes multiple YouTubers/Twitch streamers. Wednesday is a Netflix show about the character Wednesday from The Addams Family franchise. My Hero Academia is a Japanese manga/anime following a teenage boy and his classmates as they become heroes with their “Quirks.” Poppy’s Playtime is a survival/horror video game. Bluey is an Australian cartoon about a dog and her family.

*****There were different people having alters named Tommy; however, all of these Tommy alters were essentially copy-pastes of each other in terms of age, Do Not Interacts, background, and sign-offs (emojis used to indicate which alter is fronting).

******This is referring to the person themselves, not physical abuse specifically. The body is just the physical form of the person that they and the alters inhabit.

In this article, a recent study that provides a new theory as to how consciousness works, evolved, and influences other factors is discussed and explained. Multiple doctors worked on this theory, including psychologist Elizabeth Kensinger (Ph.D.), philosopher Kenneth Richman (Ph.D.), and professor Andrew Budson (MD), with Budson as the lead author and researcher. Budson and his team found multiple disorders to be related to the consciousness, including schizophrenia, dementias, some forms of autism, dissociative identity disorder, and others. The theory claims that choices are made unconsciously first, and then become conscious decisions a split second later as memories of the choices. They aimed to redefine what consciousness is since conscious actions are too slow for quick decisions like music and sports. The article later quotes Budson when he makes the claim that “our thoughts are not generally under our conscious control.” It ends by giving some of the study’s proposed applications and uses of its theory, such as fixing control behaviors, like overeating, understanding memory structure, and delving deeper into philosophy topics regarding morals and free will.

A key part of this article is its mention of DID in relation to the conscious versus subconscious. Studies are already being done that could help prove my thesis, with this being one of them. I have also read the original article, which helped provide a more in-depth explanation of the study. With this new consciousness theory, it could tie in with another theory that aims to explain deja vu, which makes the assertion that the brain accidentally processes the experience with a background system before processing it with the initial system, like long-term memory and short-term memory. Those, along with my theory of DID, could possibly all tie in with each other and provide helpful insight into each of the three aspects. They’re all incorporated with one another. One thing that doesn’t help my thesis is the mention of uncontrolled thoughts by Budson. That’s already a known fact for explaining intrusive thoughts and impulsive thinking. It adds nothing to my research.

This article talks about the movie Moon Knight and how it depicts Dissociative Identity Disorder. The author spoke with two psychiatrists to find the truth in the movie’s portrayal of DID. They describe it as “altered states of consciousness” that are “fractured parts of your consciousness that break off into another personality.” Psychiatrist David M. Reiss states that the most extreme cases are the ones where the alters are noticeably different from the host, with different behaviors, emotions, and personality traits. Anthony Tobia, a professor of psychiatry at Rutgers’ Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, brings up how DID is generally linked to a very clear origin, with each alter existing for a specific purpose or need that comes from severe trauma. An example he provides is child sexual abuse, where the child’s mind cannot process or understand what is happening, so they go into a state of disassociation that ends once the trauma is over. Repeated trauma could lead to the development of DID. Later on, they go on to speak about how DID is diagnosed and how Moon Knight’s Steven Grant could possibly have it. Because of how little is known about DID, it is hard to diagnose him on the basis of “spontaneous, unintentional, essentially unconscious division of the self into different, independently acting selves.” Reiss notes that frequent disassociation is also a symptom of multiple other mental health problems, like PTSD or disassociative amnesia. Tobia adds that everyone with DID has disassociative amnesia, but not everyone with disassociative amnesia has DID. They compare this to Moon Knight’s portrayal and say that, while he does have disassociative amnesia, it doesn’t explain his alter. Tobia says he’d have to cross reference with a physician if Grant abuses any substances or has a brain tumor to rule out explanations for his symptoms, like hallucinations. Further down in the article, both psychiatrists discuss how the portrayal of DID makes it seem much more common than it actually is. They both agree that Moon Knight’s depiction of DID is a “mixed bag” because if plays into that stereotype of “dysfunctional, dangerous and/or sociopathic/psychopathic” characters. One major difference they noted was that it is extremely rare to even be able to communicate with the alter(s) because the voices are usually perceived as auditory hallucinations. Some key examples from the movie are brought up and explained as true but greatly exaggerated. The last thing they bring up is how the show’s producers should’ve brought in a licensed psychiatrist to accurately portray DID to avoid audiences drawing incorrect and stigmatizing conclusions.

Using their description of DID as “altered states of consciousness,” it allows me to further explore how DID is located within the consciousness and delve deeper into what parts of the consciousness it resides in. A common description of DID to the average person is “split mind.” This is an exaggeration, but not entirely inaccurate. That split mind could mean they the levels of consciousness are each hosting personalities that rotate in and out of the conscious. The disassociation could be compared to the stages of sleep, in which the consciousness starts to “slip” away, leaving a responsive but unremembering person. Daydreaming could also be a comparison, but that type of disassociation is forced, and DID is a survival tactic to protect the host. With Moon Knight’s portrayal of DID, more fakers are created, making it harder to diagnose those who are actually suffering from DID. This ruins the sample population and creates incorrect statistics. Research and experiments are inaccurate if a faker is involved, causing less to be known about DID.

This video provides more information into the skepticism of DID. He gives three groups of people: those who believe the diagnoses are real, those who believe it’s real but isn’t accurately diagnosed because of symptom searching and the placebo effect, and those who don’t believe in the existence of DID and think it’s better explained by other disorders like borderline personality disorder or schizophrenia. He then goes on to explain the original idea of DID back when it was Multiple Personality Disorder and how it is currently explained. The change from MPD to DID shows that their original idea was almost completely wrong, which means their current one could also be completely wrong. The video also talks about some theoretical treatments that are used for DID. One of the treatments is to fuse the personality fragments back into one using cognitive behavior therapy. This essentially means that our thoughts, feelings, actions, and physical sensations are all related and that our thoughts and actions can affect our feelings. Delving deeper into that theory will expose the levels of consciousness, which supports my theory that DID stems from the levels of consciousness.

“Dissociative Identity Disorder: Out of the Shadows at Last?” discusses how DID is a debated disorder due to “the aetiology of the disorder.” Some believe the disorder is because of severe trauma, while others believe it is due to high suggestibility and imagination, though the latter was disproved by multiple studies shown later in the text. DID often gets misdiagnosed due to its similarities with other disorders like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and borderline personality disorder. Specialists are also reluctant to diagnose a patient with DID because of the amount of fakers, who are most definitely because of an overactive imagination. Further down in the text, where the authors are explaining the studies, all of the findings are combined to show that DID is caused by environmental factors creating a smaller hippocampal volume. In the final paragraph, the authors propose that full brain images should be used to diagnose DID because of the research found showing negative correlations between hippocampal size and trauma during childhood.

This article helps me move towards an answer to my question by providing me with multiple studies with new information that I’d never seen before. The most common conception of DID is that it’s from severe and repeated childhood trauma, but it isn’t commonly known that a smaller hippocampal volume is correlated with the disorder, as it is with other similar disorders stemming from childhood trauma. Because this article was made in 2021, the information is relevant and up to date. This also means that there are still discoveries being made about the disorder, which shows that there is still the possibility of me making a discovery.

I don’t know when I first heard about Dissociative Identity Disorder, but everything relating to the brain has always fascinated me. Human minds are very interesting. I took an AP Psychology course last year because I want to major in psychology/psychiatry. I’m hoping to get a medical degree in psychiatry. If I get far enough in my studies, I will hopefully be able to make my final paper on DID and my discoveries about it. I have a theory that DID is related to the levels of consciousness, with each alter being “held” on some level of the subconscious. This could explain why the host, or original personality, is unaware of the alters. I also think each alter’s role is assigned based on the id, ego, and superego. An alter can be a protector, persecutor, introject, gatekeeper, fragment, or other. They can be the opposite gender, different ages, or, in very rare cases, different species. Id is located in the unconscious mind and contains the primitive and instinctual urges. Ego is mainly located in the preconscious and conscious minds and acts as the reality mediator between id and superego. Superego is located in all three parts and hosts the moral and ethical standards. On the off chance that my theory is correct, it would revolutionise psychological studies.

Can your friends do this?

Read! Or else…