#speaking in tongues

This post on the booming trend of Gen-Z TikTokers claiming to have Dissociative Identity Disorder (i.e. multiple personalities) and displaying their alters appeared on Freddie DeBoer’s blog the other day, and what he’s describing is pretty horrifying. It’s an example of a certain strain of the mental health awareness youth movement having gotten way out of hand, more than I had been aware of despite being somewhat critical myself of how far some of this movement has gone.

DeBoer is of the opinion that DID probably isn’t actually a thing, or if it is, there’s been only a three-digit number of cases total in the past century. Apparently its status as a valid diagnosis actually is very controversial, which I hadn’t realized, although I always kind of imagined in the back of my mind that it was the kind of thing that could well be over-diagnosed or often arise from suggestion by psychotherapists. I’m pretty taken aback at the idea of it not even existing as an independent mental illness – I’ve only known one person who claimed to have it, and have only known of two other cases that made a strong impression on me, but it’s hard to imagine that this phenomenon could mostly be a lie or illusion.

[Content warning: some mentions of heavy stuff below, see the tags.]

The situation in which I knew someone IRL who claimed to have suffered from DID is quite an amusing story that happened to me in 2012 and which I’ve enjoyed telling people from time to time in the decade since; some details are fading slightly and I won’t go into the full story of that evening here. The basic situation was that I was going to an April Fools Day un-engagement party of two acquaintances (a man and a woman who were in a serious domestic relationship and had only gotten engaged so that they could be married for tax/insurance(?) reasons, before the Obama administration somehow changed that). I knew the guy from a university club over the past 2-3 years and had met his girlfriend / fake fiancee I think only twice prior to this party, and I didn’t know anyone else there whatsoever. I was immediately struck by how… some particular brand of eccentric… the party attendees were as a social group. By “eccentric” I mean characteristics that I hadn’t encountered before but which I’ve come to associate with very polyamory-friendly queer culture (some of them were in fact poly, but I’m not sure I found this out until later). Eccentricities included being extremely open about their sexual experiences and who had been sexually attracted to whom among the group at different points in time, being extremely open about past dramas between them and severe struggles with addiction, and specifically being open about these things toward me even though I was a complete newcomer.

Anyway, the group was recounting story after story about various guys who were apparently known to everyone in the group but were not present at the party. I don’t really remember the content of any of these stories, but some were sexual in nature and there was an element of outrageousness to most of them. The funny thing was that every time another one of these guys was brought up, the hostess / girlfriend / fake fiancee would halfheartedly try to stop the story from being told with “Don’t tell that one, it’s embarrassing to me!” I couldn’t understand why she kept saying this when no relationship between her and the guy had been specified and wondered if these were all men she had had relationships (casually sexual or romantic) with or something. Finally, after a dramatic punchline, she turned and explained to us (mainly directed at me since I was the only newcomer) that she had DID (I needed the acronym explained but was vaguely familiar with Multiple Personality Disorder). All these guys, mostly young but including an elderly Irish Catholic priest, were her alters! She explained that she no longer suffered from symptoms of DID because it was completely controlled by medication now, but that all of these alters had existed just a few years ago, until shortly before the time she had met her boyfriend / fake fiance.

All of this seemed and still seems extraordinary to me but fairly plausible. This entire group of friends was very familiar with all of these alters: the alters were essentially other members of this social group that the rest of them just hadn’t hung out with in a while. Neither the woman with DID nor anyone else in the group treated the condition as anything other than a damaging and dangerous (if sometimes bemusing) mental illness that they were glad was no longer showing symptoms. It was treated as related to the alcoholism of the hostess. No childhood trauma was discussed. Someone recounted a story of one of her alters (male, as they all were) discovering with incredulous wonderment that he had female breasts. At some point the DID symptoms had become more severe, “so that every half an hour she would tilt her head and abruptly switch to a different alter”, as one friend described it, and with them her heavy drinking. She had hit rock bottom, everyone explained to me, when her drinking landed her in the hospital with alcohol poisoning. (Incredibly, there was alcohol at this party, and most people including the hostess(!) drank but nobody had more than a drink or two!)

The hostess certainly had some eccentric quirks which somehow at the time made her condition more plausible to me. For instance, she was Irish-American and often (seemingly subconsciously) switched between different degrees of an Irish and/or American accent as she talked, often mid-sentence. She angrily referred to another acquaintance of mine (who I haven’t seen in person since before this event but has in the past several years gotten closer to me from a distance to the point that I’d call her a friend) as a “stupid f***ing wh*re” for (as it was eventually explained) the crime of making a flippant comment taken as casting doubt on her Irish identity. If I remember right, she gave me the impression of not having memories of her alters taking over (so no co-consciousness) but was able to imitate the voices of some of her alters, including the thickly-accented elderly Irish priest. She told many over-the-top stories about her-as-herself having sex with tons of men including two identical twins in a car when their mother walked in on them. I don’t know whether today I’d consider this personality and behavior as evidence fororagainst her DID being “real”, but the shared experience of this whole group of friends certainly seemed very genuine.

The second case I’ve known of that made an impression of me was of this woman on YouTube whose 3-year-old alter came out during the interview. I haven’t watched this video in years, but if I remember right, she did mention being repeatedly abused as a small child by a family friend or something. Her system appeared to have some degree of co-consciousness (although I don’t recall if that term was used), because she was able to say that such-and-such an alter wasn’t willing to come out because she was too shy; later, when the 3-year-old alter was being interviewed, she was able to “go back in to get Mommy to come back out” at the interviewer’s request. I came out of that video thinking, “This could all be acting, but it’s superb acting if so, and would this woman really choose to put on such an elaborate charade for attention?” I still more or less feel that way.

The third case that stuck with me, which I don’t feel like trying to look up, was from a documentary about an Australian (I think?) woman who had suffered under the most severe and disgusting sexual abuse that I’ve ever heard of at the hands of her father growing up (like every single day for years and years). During childhood she had developed scores of alters ready to step into her body to take turns suffering the abuse. In the documentary, she was taken back to the house she grew up in to describe the particular parts of the house that her father had done such-and-such to her, with her mind and body going into so much distress that she could barely get the words out. It was an absolutely horrifying documentary. If I remember right, at the time, her father was still on trial. Everything about this story seemed unfortunately believable to me… except that the number of alters claimed was something like 30,000 (at least I remember it was a five digit number)! I remember thinking to myself at the time that there’s no possible way someone could develop that many alters, or even if they did, there would be no earthly way for others to individuate and count them all! I’m not sure that any author in history, not even George R. R. Martin, has come up with 30,000 distinct characters. Even if each alter showed up only once ever, it would take like a good decade or so for each of them to appear during only one waking hour! I chalked this completely implausible number down to sloppy journalism or something and didn’t doubt the main story.

I would go ahead and say that, modulo looking into the actual studies DeBoer and others mention, I imagine that DID must exist but must be much rarer than these TikTok culture people suppose, that (again) it seems like an easy thing to over-diagnose and for a therapist or psychologist to instill in a client. Now that I think about it more critically, I can imagine a means, by a certain type of mental process, for someone to sincerely believe themself to have alternate personalities, especially if they believe themself to have co-consciousness of these alters, while they are essentially made-up characters. It is possible that these characters have become so real in the person’s mind (as I’m sure happens with characters invented by a fiction writer who is getting very deep into their work) that they can spontaneously hear what each character “would say” and find themself blurting it out at times. This is world where a lot of humans believe they’re “speaking in tongues”, as in letting some supernatural entity speak through their mouths, which I would consider to have a perfectly natural neurological explanation. So many cases of DID, especially among younger, hyper-mental-illness-aware people could be misinterpretations of a certain more mundane internal mental experience.

But this is just me blabbering and speculating, without a psychiatry degree or any real background knowledge about DID, so who knows. All I’m sure of is that a lot of DeBoer refers to is transparently BS and horrifying.