Dissociative Identity Disorder

Ever felt like you've had another personality or another person inside of you? Or have you ever encountered a situation that you felt like you couldn't handle but mysteriously you handled it? Well those unusual feelings that you may have experienced could be related to Dissociative Identity Disorder also known as Multiple Identity Disorder better known as split personality. Dissociative Identity Disorder is a mental condition whereby a single individual evidences or experiences two or more distinctive identities or which more commonly known as personalities and each of them possesses its own pattern of perceiving and interacting with society. Sometimes the personalities find themselves attempting to take control of the individual's behavior. The individual may experience some associated memory loss that proceeds beyond normal forgetfulness which is called Acute Dissociative Amnesia.

In order for the individual to experience DID, he/she must be completely independent of substance abuse. According to wikipedia.org, the condition is in no way related to schizophrenia. The following information was received from wikipedia.org. Schizophrenia is more complex and refers to a fracture in the normal functioning of the brain, than the personality. Many professional psychiatrists and commentators debate over the disorder saying that there is no empirical evidence to support the existence or its diagnosis. As you can see it would be somewhat difficult to prove the existence of this disorder. Dissociation has been defined as a complex mental process that provides a coping mechanism for individuals confronting painful and/or traumatic situations. It is characterized by a disintegration of the ego. A person suffering from dissociation doesn't completely disengage from reality, they may appear to have multiple personalities to deal with different situations as I mentioned above.

When one of the personalities cannot deal with stress, the consciousness of the person is believed to be given over to another personality to eliminate the trigger or pressure causing the stress. Which in definition is similar to a defense mechanism but the defense mechanism deals with more than stress. One of the results of proving the existence of this disorder is that there were once so few documented cases of what was once referred to as multiple personality. Some of the symptoms of this disorder are: depression, anxiety, phobias, panic attacks, fluctuating levels of function, time distortion and many more. For a more comprehensive look into this disorder check into wikipedia.org.