How Dissociative Identity Disorder Works

Dissociative Identity Disorder was known as multiple personality disorder until a case of mass hysteria brought on by the movie-mad public and unscrupulous psychiatrists led to a stigma over the term. Now psychiatry has gotten serious about the condition.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to you stuff you should know from house Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Choke Bryant, and there's no
there's no one of my alters. No, he's his own dude. Okay,

(00:22):
do you have alters? Okay? Do you know? Not that
I know. I think we've each seen a bit of
an altar in each other. But that's just called that's
being jerks every now and in bad mood. Yeah, that's
a little different. I was on a forum about a
forum for people with the associative identity disorder and like

(00:45):
the from what I was reading, you sometimes you feel crowded. Um.
Some people have like felt like they have had altars
like their whole life, as long as they've been around interesting. Um,
sometimes they don't. Like One of the entries I saw
was like, does your altar have to have a name?
And it was like, I don't necessarily think of them

(01:05):
as people, and another person responded and so that that's
often like an early stage of the process, and then
over time is they become more pronounced, they end up
adopting names, or it is uh, super moody or some
other bad behavior that you say is disassociative identity disorder,

(01:27):
and you give it a name, Well, you don't, your
therapist does, yeah, or you might. Yeah. So it's controversial
and we'll get to that. But um, I guess we
should start off by saying that another name for this
a more popular name, even though it's been uh since
n D I D. The original name was multiple personality

(01:49):
disorder personality. Yeah. When I was reading this at first,
I was like, this sounds an awful lot like split personality.
It is. It is. They just renamed it and we'll
see pretty soon, which is kind of a good move
because from what I can tell, it seems to be
a real thing that underwent a period of intense exploitation

(02:13):
and abuse, so much so that now there's a lot
of people who doubt that it's a real thing, but
that there are still people out there who do suffer
from it enough so that psychiatry has said, we need
to change the name and then just focus on these
people that really have this. Now. Did they change it
because it had a stigma? Really? That was the only reason. Yeah. Yeah,

(02:36):
there's this excellent article um on I O nine actually
about UM. I think it's called like the myth of
dissociative identity disorder and um, the myth of multiple personality disorder.
Thank you they went old school, yeah, um, and the
lady who wrote it did a really good job of
explaining the controversy around it and also like the renewal

(02:58):
of it as well, like how it became renewed. But yeah,
it was because it was basically, um exploited and fictionalized
by the psychiatric community a few notable people that we'll
get to all that though. Yeah, so, I mean everybody
has heard of multiple personality disorder thanks to that that
period of exploitation from the fifties to the eighties. Um,

(03:22):
so you have probably a pretty good idea of the
concept behind it of the disorder. To begin with, it's
m a single person has their normal, their original um,
what's called their host personality, and sometimes, especially under periods

(03:43):
of acute psychosocial stress, maybe confronted with stress or something
they don't want to think about or talk about or whatever,
another one of their personalities will emerge, and they're generally
tied to a trauma and early life that you may
not even know about until you have therapy that out

(04:06):
of your subconscious right. And Um, they believe that for
dissociative identity disorder, when it does come about from the
result of a trauma, it comes about as a coping
mechanism to protect the mind because the the host personality
simply can't handle dealing with it. But there is some

(04:28):
aspect of that person which is characterized through another personality
that can handle it. And so that personality will come
out to handle those periods where um, the the person
is confronted with those memories. Yeah. And it can express
itself in different ways depending on, UM, how severe a

(04:50):
disorder is. But generally, if you've ever seen the United
States of terra, um you ever seen that? No, I
know of it, but I've never seen an episode. Emily
was into it. Um, we're talking about completely new people.
But your behavior, your speech, you can be a different sex,
you can have a different accent, um, different species. Yeah,

(05:11):
you could be like a dog technically, UM. I think
that's a little more rare. I would imagine. Yeah. Um,
And there is no timetable that's um, it doesn't necessarily
happen like right after a trauma, can come out years later. Um.
And it just there's not an awareness necessarily. Uh, that's
a big one. Well, there's not an awareness of the

(05:34):
host person doesn't have an awareness of the altars coming out.
Sometimes they do sometimes, but the altars usually are aware
of the other altars and the host. And that was
like it was in the United States of Tara. Yeah,
sometimes the um the altars, which I don't know if
we specifically said or not yet, but an altar is
one of these non one of the other personalities within

(05:57):
the host personality. Yeah, and there's there's usually at LEAs
to others. There has to be to a host at
least one other right, UM. But then it can go
People have reported up to a hundred or beyond UM
and they can happen at the same time too. Yeah.
That's another thing is they can switch between them um

(06:18):
pretty quickly. And these periods where the altars emerge can
take place over the course of days or weeks. Basically,
if you if you if there's a period where the
altars are really kind of coming out and fluidly changing,
that's a period of severe stress that that person is undergoing. Yeah,
maybe calling back that previous drama. Maybe not. It might

(06:40):
just be triggered by stress period and you said also
that some sometimes a lot of times the altars are
aware of each other. There's also been plenty of documented
cases where the altars don't like each other. Sometimes they
don't like the host um or they don't have much
respect for the host uh, or like one of the

(07:00):
other altars, they don't like how they deal with the
host or deal with life or something like that, which
is kind of neat because that that shows that these
altars are aware that that the effects or the actions
of the other altar or the host affects them. Yeah,
like they are somehow they understand that they're part of

(07:23):
the whole. Well, you can be uh, the host person
that just the regular Josh is a non drinker and
you could have an alcoholic altar. Yeah, thinks the host
is a square And like, I can't wait to get
my hands on a drink because Josh is like he's
he won't go near the stuff. But now that I'm randy,

(07:43):
I'm gonna buy that twelve pack of maister Brow. Yeah,
and very I don't think I've ever had a sip
of maister Brow. I had a very long night with
it about fifteen years ago. Okay, so you might have
undergone something that's similar to UM, the asociative disorder. We
should say also when they renamed associative disorder, they also

(08:06):
took all of these components that used to make up
multiple personality disorder and split them. So now there's four
associated disorders. UM. There is dissociative identity disorder, which is
the most extreme, that's the one with altars and different
personalities coming out. And then there is UM dissociative amnesia,

(08:30):
which is remember in our Amnicia podcasts who have brought
this one about UM, where you just kind of forget
a certain experience. Yeah, like I had this terrible car crash.
I don't even remember it all right, And it was
dissociative amnesia. That that's that where it's like you don't
remember the terrible thing that happened to you. Um. There's

(08:52):
also dissociative fugue, which is where you basically just leave
your life. You walk away from your life and maybe
you seem like you're kind of out of it or whatever,
maybe you're under the influence of a different personality. UM.
It's it's not just like I'm not gonna come home
any longer. It's like you left your life and are

(09:12):
a different person. You're leading in different life in the
last days, weeks, months, um, and then chuck. The fourth
one is the personalization disorder, which is like you're you're
watching your life as if you're viewing a movie. You're detached.
And I think that one. I think these can work
together because I know that if you have d I D,

(09:33):
you definitely have moments of experiencing uh that one. Yeah,
they they like, even if you're just the host, you
might feel like you're just watching yourself instead of being yourself.
So the dissociative identity disorder diagnosis is almost has like
split personalities fluid is switches between the different disorders, and
the one thing that they all have in common is

(09:53):
that they all appear to be coping mechanisms to protect
the mind from a trauma. They're basically saying like I'm
check king out of my life or I'm detaching myself
from my life, or I'm just not going to remember
that part of my life right, or I am I
can't handle my life and this other personality can. Yeah,

(10:14):
And it's not it's not always just those things that
you know. Some of the side symptoms are can be hallucinations.
A lot of times it leads to substance abuse or
eating disorders, UM depressioning, anxiety, and mood swings obviously obvi.
And uh, memory disturbance is either short or long term, right,

(10:35):
it's kind of one of the keys. Probably UM and
you apparently a person suffering from dissociative identity sort of
just kind of like you said, foggy is a really
good descriptor of if not life, then their periods of UM,
this condition flaring up, I guess. Yeah, just their sense
of place and time is just completely disrupted. It sounds awful. Yeah,

(10:59):
it is awful. Yeah, it is UM. Like I said,
I haven't seen the United States of Terror, but apparently
it's a lot of comic effect out of Yeah, of course,
but if you have dissociative identity disorder, you'd likely have
a really hard struggle in life. Yeah, and it shows
some of that too. I mean, it's obviously for TV,
so there is some comedy with some of the altars,
but it also shows the toll that it takes on

(11:20):
the family and stuff like that. So, uh, this has
been around for a little while. We've understood it its
symptoms since at least the late eighteenth century. Yeah, and
and some early scientists and researchers did a pretty good
job considering how long ago it was nailing it. Um. Well,
it's a pretty like extravagant yeah case. Yeah. People sure, doctors,

(11:45):
especially in the eighteen hundreds and seventeen hundreds, were like
pretty excited about it, you know. Um, so demonic possession
and weird things like that. Back in the day. A
lot of many of those cases may have been things
like these disorders. Uh, we just didn't know about it
back then, so we just said someone was a hysteric

(12:05):
or a witch and they killed them, yeah, or lock
them up, you know, in some room. Yeah. Um, but
the first symptoms of the i D came around in
nineteen and sev it's a long time ago. Yeah, a
guy named eber Heart Gamelon No, yeah, Gamelon, Yeah, I
think it's g M E L I N. I would

(12:27):
go silent GM that melon. Why don't they just spell
it right, that's just a guess. Yeah. Well, he was
the first one to describe the conditions. He had a
patient who was a middle class German woman who had
an altar who was a French aristocrat. So he hypnotized her,
brought out the French aristocrat, the animal magnetized her or mesmerism. Yeah,

(12:49):
and we did an episode on hypnosis if you want
to go check that out. Yeah, it's a very good one. Um.
But up until the late eighteen hundreds, about eighteen eighty,
they generally thought that what the deal was was that
humans had a background consciousness and that was actually greater
than our regular primary consciousness. And when that background consciousness

(13:12):
got sick, then that's what brought out the gray. Right,
that's what mental illness came from. Pretty much. Basically, it
was another way of putting the conscious in the subconscious
because I mean, and it still today, people believe the
subconscious exists and that it's the one that's really running
the show. Realize, that's still the belief that it's greater

(13:33):
as far as I know, certainly among Freudians. But yeah,
that's true. I don't I don't think anyone's really discredited
the idea of the subconscious, all right, who knows, Well,
sure we're gonna find out here. They're about the same
time as that was going on, Um, they started to
tie it with childhood trauma, which is pretty spot on.

(13:53):
And then a French patient named Louis viev Viva Vive.
He was twenty two years old and he had this
is in the late eight had six personalities. Doctors just
went crazy over this guy. Um, they didn't overlap with
their memories. They thought that they were just hypnotic variations

(14:15):
of each other. They didn't understand though, at the time,
that they were actually completely separate personalities. They thought it
was just all parts of Louis, which if you, if
you really kind of follow the timeline of um, the
I d like they were. We've come back to that
understanding of it. Yeah, I guess you're right. You know

(14:38):
that it's not like just different personalities. It's just different
aspects of a single personality that are kind of given
voice in a very literal like different voice in a
literal way, right, you know. Yeah, that's a good point.
And then after that are actually around the same time.
Pierre Janette, another French researcher, UM said, no, these are

(15:00):
different personalities and it comes from a trauma that they suffered. Right,
So he was kind of hit it early on. Yeah,
he I guess he laid the groundwork for the understanding
for the next century or so to come UM and
then Uh. It wasn't until nineteen o five that somebody
claimed to cure a person with UM dissociative identity disorder

(15:22):
again back then known as multiple personality disorder UM, a
guy named Morton Prince Morty Prince not Martin, Prince Morton
Prince UM. He basically said that using hypnosis he was
able to UM coax out the very easily coax out
the altars. Because this is something like very early on,

(15:45):
dissociative identity disorder and hypnosis were basically just went hand
in hand, and UM alienists believed that they could use
hypnosis to very easily draw out the altars, which they
could who am I talking to now exactly? Or I
want to talk to you know this personality and then
start confronting those personalities and convincing them to integrate into

(16:08):
the host personality. And then once you had full successful integration,
you had a reunited whole host person who was just
one personality. But the the the key is is that
they're using hypnosis, and hypnosis doesn't isn't real, right, So

(16:29):
like we have a huge clue here to a mystery
of what exactly is going on. But before anybody really
kind of faces that and confronts it um and starts
to really truly treat associative identity disorder on its face
or at its root. It treated it on its face.
Psychiatry took a really like it just went all in

(16:53):
and doubled down on the most um, the sexiest craziest
versions against come up with. And it did this in
the fifties. Um, and we'll tell you how right after
this message, so Chuck, psychiatry is about to say, multiple

(17:13):
multiple personality disorder is um exactly what it looks like.
Some of these people are beyond looney. This guy over
here as a hundred personalities and seven of them are dogs,
different dogs. Can you believe this? And uh, these these
cases are going to start to grow by leaps and
bounds in number. And it all can be traced back

(17:35):
to a single book which is based on single case history. Yeah,
well a couple of books. Yeah. But to start, it
was all about Eve, that's right, the Three Faces of Eve.
It was a book written in seven by two psychiatrists,
and it was about a woman whose real name was

(17:56):
Chris Costner size more, who may or may not be
related to Kevin Costner. Neither I nor anybody on the
internet appears to know for sure. Oh really I looked
and nobody all there are questions. I can't believe I
didn't think to look that up. Yeah Costner, Sure, there's
like two of them, Kevin and who Chris Okay, Um,
so she uh Chris Costner size More went um by

(18:19):
the name of Eva White, or at least that's what
they called her in the book, although funnily I didn't
look up to see whether or not she's related to
Tom size More, just Kevin Costner. Yeah, did I say
Eva White? I meant Eve White? Yeah, I might said Eve.
Either way, it's Eve White. And she was referred because
she had headaches amnesia, and she worked with these two

(18:41):
psychiatrists and a couple of altars emerged and they wrote
a book. Well they supposedly cured her and reintegrated them
back into one host person. But they wrote a book
really quickly that exploded on the scene, super popular, made
them a ton of money. Uh, there was a big

(19:01):
blockbuster movie. Um, it was just it took over, well
not took over, but it made a huge splash in
just people's consciousness about what this is like for the
first time. It was everyone you know, like you said,
it's kind of super sexy and interesting and people were

(19:22):
captivated by this new disease. And this Eve woman who
was really three women and one right there was Eve
Peggy and I can't remember the other one, but um
one was like a good girl, uh, the other one
was like a bad girl or a tough girl. And

(19:43):
then the host was just kind of a combination of
the two. Yeah, and she's still alive, she still is well.
She um so that this doctor, um was it thig Pen. Yeah,
doctor Thigpen. Um, it was treating her Corbett Thigpen and
a colleague. I believe his name is Henny Cleckly. Seriously,

(20:09):
so um Thigpen was the one who wrote, like really
went off the deep end with the book and then
sold the ladies life rights without her approval to Hollywood,
and they made this story or this movie and like
you said, it was Fox, Yeah it was, and it was.
It made a pretty big splash, both the book and
the movie. Um. And she came out and wrote a

(20:32):
book called I'm Eve and said, Dude, this guy is
a total fraud, Like, yes, I do have multiple personalities,
but they didn't cure me. Like this guy kept insisting
I was cured. It didn't work. He uh, he shot
me up with sodium pentethal and like just used the
power of suggestion. Um. And he's just a huckster, basically

(20:55):
he was after the story. UM. But here I am
left with my conditions still. Yeah. And she had reportedly suffered,
UM witnessed a bad accident and witness to deaths as
a child, and that's where hers was born. So UM
that set the stage that for popular consciousness to UM

(21:16):
kind of come to understand multiple personality disorder, which again
that's what it was called at the time. UM. And
I mean it was all over the place, like people
just people were just aware of it, whereas they hadn't
been before. UM. And it was kind of like a
one two punch. You had all about Eve and the fifties,

(21:36):
and then about fifteen years later you had Sybil. And
Sybil was the one that blew this thing wide open.
It just happened, I guess, to arrive at a time
when UM America was really ready to UM undergo or
be party to psychological exploitation like big time. Yeah. And

(21:59):
in three is when Sybil the book came out, UM
written by Oh uh, let's see Flora Rita Schreiber about
her treatment with psychiatrist Cornelia Wilbur and about the treatment
of the real name was Shirley Mason, and they kept
that a secret for many years, Sybil, Yeah, to protect

(22:19):
her her identity. Um, but eventually the name came out. Well,
she died in the nineties. Yeah, she died ninety breast cancer.
But um, she had sixteen personalities. And like I said,
Sally Field played her in the movie. It was a
big hit. I remember my mom reading the book. It
was all the rage in the seventies. Yeah, it was huge, huge,

(22:40):
And um, she was actually an artist, a painter, and
like taught painting too, I think. But they found a
hundred and three paintings in her basement after she died,
and she only signed the ones that she felt like
she the host had painted, Like, she wouldn't sign the
ones that an altar had paint it. So many of

(23:00):
them are unsigned. But it's when you look at it,
it's really like they're all different, Like some are like realists,
some are abstract, some are impressionistic. Really all over the map,
and it's just I don't know, kind of a testament
to like how real this can be? Is there a
website that hosts all of them? Uh? I don't know.
I think if you look just look up, you know,

(23:21):
hidden paintings of Sybil, you can probably buy them. And
that would be what s I B y L is?
How they spelled that? No s y B I L Yeah?
Um so Sybils the smash hit. It's based on the wave,
the first wave that was brought about by all about
Eve and the public is um just fully aware of

(23:41):
multiple personality disorders like these two are like the cream
of the crop. There were tons of made for TV
movies and um Donna Hue episodes and all sorts of
just chatter about multiple personality disorder, and all of a sudden,
the cases go from about two hundred in the medical
literature to suddenly eight thousand after the movie Sybyl comes out,

(24:07):
and it seems like every psychiatrist has a patient with
multiple personality disorder. And because of all this sensationalism that
went along with it, there are fortunately a caudra of
serious psychiatrists and psychologists who said, wait a minute, what,
like what what what's going on here? Like movies aren't

(24:28):
supposed to trigger outbreaks of disorders. Some people explain it
away by saying, well, there, these people may have been
suffering like this. They didn't have a name to associate
with her. The movie gave him the name so they
could go to the doctor and speak to it and
be treated. Right. Um, that is one explanation. The problem
is the explanation that this was a real phenomenon and

(24:52):
not like some sort of um, what are they call,
I guess outbreak of maths hysteria a little bit? Yeah, um,
And this is a no way to diminish anybody who's
suffering mentally in any way. Yeah, yeah, of course. But
I'm talking about the specific moment in history in the
seventies in the West where there was an outbreak of

(25:13):
multiple personality disorder cases. Um. The idea that it was
a real thing was definitely undermined by the civil case itself, which,
like contemporaneously some psychiatrists said, this isn't a peer reviewed
case history, and we think this is basically all just
made up. Well, the lid was blown off, specifically by

(25:36):
a single doctor in Sybil's case, Dr Herbert Spiegel apparently
treated um Sybil, well, it's not a real name, but
we'll call her Sibil. While the Uh Wilbur was out
of town and he was like, you know what, this
doesn't add up? He said, these case notes. Yeah, he said,
it seems like she's really highly suggestible. Uh. It seems

(25:59):
like you gave her dyan pentethal and she's addicted to that,
and it seems like you might have not necessarily on
purpose coached her into saying these things. Well, there's there
was um at least one instance where that fill in
doctor who was treating um uh Sybil. Sybil said that

(26:21):
they were in a session and Sybil said, um, which
which personality you want me to be? Uh? Which it's
not something you say when you can't control your altars uh.
And then secondly there was in the case notes there
was a reference to a note or a statement by
Sybil to her doctor Dr Wilbur who said, I do

(26:42):
not even have a double. I am all of them.
I've been lying in my pretense of them. And Dr
Wilbur noted that she wrote this up to avoidance behavior,
that Sybil was trying to avoid having to confront reintegrating
her her personalities, and that's why she was saying that
she was lying um. So, when all of this kind

(27:02):
of came out and was added up and combined with
this outbreak of um multiple personality disorder cases in the
late seventies early eighties, it was it was pretty damning.
But then when it became obvious that satanic ritual abuse,
that moral panic that happened was following right on the

(27:25):
heels of this, I think the scientific community stepped back
and said, Okay, America's is crazy, well and not in
the mental health problem kind of way, like just just crazy. Yeah.
I think I think a lot of that came about
because the it started to become a legal defense, uh,

(27:46):
and people started explaining way very bad behaviors on altars
and claiming in court like it wasn't me that killed
my wife, it was Tony. Man. It sounds like we're
talking about the Lifetime Movie Network here, you know, dud,
This Lifetime Movie Network is all over these stories. I
bet you there's quite a few of those movies out there. Right.
So all this is going on, it becomes very apparent

(28:10):
that this isn't a real thing. Um And fortunately for
the people who actually do suffer from this disorder, psychiatry said,
all right, let's get rid of the multiple personality disorder moniker,
and we're gonna rename it dissociative identity disorder. We're gonna
completely remove it from what just happened because that was pitiful,

(28:33):
and um, we're gonna get down to basics. We're gonna
go back to the way of addressing this, of viewing
this that um, the doctor who described Louis Vivey came
up with all the way back in that it's just
variations of the host personality, not truly separate personalities, and

(28:56):
that if we treat the underlying cause or even just
the co morbid symptoms drug addiction, alcoholism, depression, the hallucinations,
the mood swings, anxiety, if we treat all this, most
likely the depression identity disorders also going to be treated
in kind. Yeah. I think another thing that lended itself

(29:17):
to that too, where doctor started being sued in the
nineties by people saying, wait a minute, you've got me
on these drugs, you're hypnotizing me. You're saying, you're calling
coercing me into calling out these altars, and so I'm
gonna sue you. Yeah, I'm glad you said that, because
it is worth revisiting I don't think we've really laid
this at the feet of psychiatrists enough. There were people

(29:38):
who saw this movie who were feeling this way, who
maybe felt like they they had more than one personality
and went to and I think everyone feels that way
a little bit sometimes, you know. But if you're a
highly suggestible person and you see this movie and you
start thinking like, wow, maybe that's what I have, and
they inject you with Sodian pentethal right, you go to

(30:00):
a medical professional, that medical professional isn't supposed to be like, yeah, yeah,
you have that. And and this one's named Tim. Tim
is very aggressive personality. I can see Tim coming out now.
And then all of a sudden, the person's like Tim, Like, yes,
that person's life has been altered, probably for the negative,

(30:20):
because of a um, at the very least, a dubious
medical expert um. And yes, so of course they were sued,
and they should have been sued. It was a really
dark spot in the history of psychiatry, which has a
lot of dark spots on its history. Frankly, you know
this was this was one of them. But like I said, again, um,

(30:40):
there were a group of psychiatrists who said, no, this
is there's something real here. We've just been looking at
it the wrong way. We allowed it to become sensationalized.
We need to learn that lesson. But at the same time,
we need to identify the people who really are suffering
from this and figure out how to help them. Uh,
and we'll figure out we'll talk about how they They
figured it out right after this. Okay, Chuck, So now

(31:06):
we're at they've renamed multiple personality disorder and now it's
UM dissociative identity disorder. So let's talk about how it's treated,
how it manifests, what it is. So the I guess
the modern understanding from what I can tell, seems to
be that UM dissociative identity disorder is a person who

(31:29):
has well, let's talk about personality. What identity is? Okay,
what if your identity is basically the a script that
you've been equipped with that's been developed and refined, a nuance,
but also very much fertilized and solidified over the years,

(31:49):
so that when you are faced with any any anything
in life, you're going to react in a prescribe predictable way.
That's your identity. Now, what if your identity is such
that UM it doesn't handle stress very well, but you're
still confronted with stress. But that doesn't but handling stress

(32:13):
isn't part of that script that makes up your identity. Well,
in the case of a very very extreme case, it's
possible that a person will subsume their normal personality and
draw out some aspect that isn't predictable, that isn't prescribed,
but it's still part of themselves and put that front
and center. Deal with that stress, and it might cuss

(32:36):
out the person like a psychiatrist who's confronting them with
the stress, and may be very protective of that personality.
But the point is it's still part of that single person.
It's just a different aspect showing when you take it
to its extreme conclusion, what you're looking at then are
two different personalities, split personalities, or multiple personalities, right, That's

(33:02):
apparently what dissociative identity disorder is. So are you saying
you don't believe that when someone comes out in a
British accent and says my name is Rob, Like, that's
not real. I don't think the word real is a
good word because I think that that person it's real,
and that's reality right there. You know. I mean, like,

(33:23):
if if a person is experiencing a different personality and
it happens to be a British guy named Rob, that's
the reality, right then. I don't think these people who
have dissociative identity disorder are faking. I don't think it's
made up. I don't think they're necessarily playing along. I
think that's what happened in the eighties. Everybody was just
kind of playing along. But I think if you actually

(33:45):
have dissociative identity disorder, like this is your experience, this
is reality to you, like you do feel detached from
your life, you do have missing time, like you do
experience this, So yes, it's real for you. It's more
how the psychiatric community or the mental health community has

(34:05):
to view the associative identity disorder in order to treat it.
That it isn't that they aren't separate personalities, because you
can basically, um, that's tantamount to saying you're possessed by
a demon that's a whole other person in there with you,
and that's just not the case. And if you view
it like that, you're not going to be able to
treat it. Did you find anyone famous with it. No,

(34:25):
did you herschell Walker? No? Really, yeah, you knew about that, right. Uh. No,
famous former Georgia Bulldog running back an NFL star, herschel Walker.
He suffers from d I D and he wrote a
book called Breaking Free. And he has no memory of
winning the Heisman Trophy. Oh no, he has no memory

(34:46):
of putting a gun to his wife's head something that's
happened in his life. Uh, no memory of any of
these things. And he says he has as many as
twelve altars. And um, his his wife. I don't know
if they're still together. I don't think so. But his
wife in many years thinks like it all makes sense now.

(35:06):
Like when she finally he came out with this and
he just came out with a few years ago, she
was like, well, this totally makes sense because I saw
very different people through the course of our marriage out
of nowhere that made no sense. And she's like, it
was not a mood swing. And um he Uh. He's
famous for not just being a football player, Like he

(35:29):
was into ballet. He went to FBI school, He was
an Olympic bobs letter. What he's he's done all these
things he was He's a mixed martial artist now and
he thinks that these altars are you know, basically why
he has so many like varying interest in life. Yeah,
that is really fascinating. So what do you think about it?

(35:52):
What's your take on to socio by Danny disorder? Well,
I'm not sure i'd see the difference between Like that's
what a sort of told disorder is, is someone believing
something about themselves. Like I guess I don't see the
difference between someone thinking they have these different personalities. Like
a personality isn't a tangible thing anyway, Like you can't

(36:15):
touch it. So if someone believes they have four different personalities,
then they may as well have four different personalities. Like
I get you what you're saying. I guess it's all
part of that person. But if it's a disorder, that
means it's causing a problem. I think the fact that

(36:37):
when I see cases of what looks like real d
I d like herschel Walker no memory of of certain things,
like it's it's certainly more powerful than you know. That's
bad Chuck coming out because I don't deal what stressed. Well,
we'll call him tony, you know, but if I blacked
out and didn't remember my actions for several days, and

(36:58):
those actions included putting a gun to my wife's said,
then that's a whole different thing, you know, because I'm
certainly moody. We all know bad Chuck, well know Tony,
Tony nice? All right, Well, I guess that's it about
dissociative identity disorder. If you want to learn more about it,
type those words in the search part how stuffworks dot
com and they'll bring up this article. And since I

(37:19):
said search parts, time for listener mail. Uh, I'm gonna
call this real world advice for Tony. This is guy's
name is Tony? Oh yeah, total accident. Hey, guys, I
recently returned from to the States from living in the
Republic of Korea, mostly teaching English there for the last

(37:40):
four years. Returned home to get a job different from that.
And now that I'm at home, I can't figure out
what to do to give you context. I've been actively
interviewing with all sorts of companies, organizations, and firms positions
and marketing, sales, business development, finance, consulting. Anyway, I find
most of those roles to be too boring. I also

(38:02):
feel pressured in burden because I studied engineering at Columbia
University and feel a burden to be successful quote unquote,
I am very much stuck in a rut looking for
a job, uh, not excited by my prospects and asking
what do I want to do. I don't really want
to go back to school because I can't afford to
pay for a master's degree, especially if I'm not certain

(38:24):
or pretty certain that that advanced degree will improve my situation.
So I'm emailing you guys because I'm an advocer and
I think we share similar perspectives on things, and you
have great careers that are thrilling and aspirable. True. So
I'm not quite saying I want to be you guys
or I want your jobs, but I see both these
people that are really interesting, salt of the earth folk

(38:46):
who can relate to my situation more so than my
investment management, consulting, law, youring med school friends. So Tony H.
De Frieda's wants to know what he should do. Man,
that's a tough one. I've actually been thinking about this
TuS email for a couple of days now. Yeah, Okay,
I mean like he's asking for help, so give it

(39:06):
to him. Well, my first bit of advice would be
to narrow down your scope a little bit. If you
studied engineering and you're looking at marketing, sales, business development, finance, consulting,
I think you're casting your net a little too wide. Yeah,
So my first bit of advice is to narrow that down,
and my second bit of advice is to narrow it

(39:28):
down based on often tell people like what do you what,
what do you love, and what would you love to do?
Ideally what they call blue sky territory here in the
corporate world. It sounds like also to me, you're asking
a lot of people, but you're spending a lot of
time like just keeping it at the forty foot level.
Like maybe you sit for a little while with a

(39:49):
legal pen a pen and like be quiet and gather
your thoughts and then brainstorm after that, just even for
like a half hour twenty minutes something like that. If
it's for your future that you're thinking about, you could
probably come up with a half hour to dedicate just
to that. But just turn everything off and like really

(40:10):
focus inward and say what do you want to do,
and then go for that and don't feel obligated to
use your degree. Most people can go to college, don't
use the degree that they got. It's more like they
went through college to show they can go through college,
you know. Yeah, and he didn't lift engineer anywhere and
what he was looking into, even though that's what his
degrees in. Yeah. Here's the other thing too, there are

(40:32):
very few um career choices or life paths that go
that go absolutely nowhere. And you shouldn't be afraid to
take steps that you that aren't necessarily the prescribed way
to go. Yeah, and don't be worried about locking yourself

(40:53):
in for life necessarily, you know, like, try something out
that you love and it may bear fruit, and if
it doesn't work, you can always just go get like
a guaranteed job or something afterward. Yeah. Yeah, And something
that interests you now isn't necessarily going to interest you
five years from now. So yeah, I think you're worrying
too much, Tony, or Tony if this was a very

(41:14):
sly way of trying to get the word out with
your resume and you're out there and you want to
Columbia University grad engineering degree, who's interested in sales and
business development and finance? Let us know, interested in anything
see captain ing whatever, Uh, so spend some time be

(41:35):
quiet with your thoughts, trying decide what you love and
if you could make a career out of that. And uh,
if we hear anything, then we'll let you know. It
sounds like you're up for adventure because you lived in Korea.
We have him for garden seed. Yeah, we gave him
a lot of advice here. Yeah, this is plenty. Take
some of that and do something with it, Tony. Let
us know how it goes. Please. Uh. If you have

(41:56):
made any kind of life choice or decision based on
something Chuck and I and said, we want to know
how that went. You can tweet to us at s
Y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook
dot com, slash Stuff you Should Know, send us an
email the Stuff Podcast at Discovery dot com, check out
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us at our home on the web. Stuff you Should
Know dot com for more on this and thousands of

(42:22):
other topics. Is it how Stuff Works dot com