Playing With Marbles
Vocal Fry Studios, Brain Canada
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Dissociative Identity Disorder: You, Plural
Imagine having an illness that TV and film spent decades labeling as “dangerous” and “crazy”. This is what happened with Dissociative Identity Disorder or DID – it used to be called multiple personality disorder and you probably only know about it from the media. It’s stigmatized, misunderstood, and under-diagnosed. DID is one of the most controversial psychiatric disorders. Some doctors refuse to believe it exists, despite well documented cases and its place in the DSM-5. Because of this stigma, it’s not surprising that people often feel like they need to hide their DID diagnosis, but if you only know about it from TV it could be surprising to you that DID might not be so easy to identify. We’re talking to Nicole, who lives with DID. They are a three-part system and they’re going to introduce us to each identity that lives in their brain. They’re also going to tell us what it’s really like to live with multiple identities and how different it is to what we’ve been shown in the media. Nicole didn’t even realize they had DID until they were married and their partner started to notice something wasn’t quite right. Brains don’t just create new identities for no reason, at least as far as we can tell. DID appears to be a defence mechanism. We’re going to find out how a brain can experience trauma so bad that it decides “someone else needs to deal with this”, and then creates that person in the form of another identity. Shari Botwin is the author of “Stolen Childhoods: Thriving After Abuse”, and a clinician who has spent over 25 years working with people that have DID. That book is full of real conversations between clinician and patients looking to understand how childhood trauma affected their adult lives, so she’s going to help us understand the effects of trauma on a person, a brain, and on an identity… or identities. Shari’s been on her own journey to recovery from childhood trauma and post traumatic stress disorder, so she knows it better than most. Dissociative Identity Disorder sparks the questions… What even is an identity? How do we define who we are as a person? Living with DID is about figuring that out, and recovering is about bringing all those frayed threads back together into a cohesive whole. DID is not about picking your favourite part and ditching the rest, it’s about learning to love your whole self.
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