Stuff You Should Know - How Dissociative Identity Disorder Works

Episode Date: April 15, 2014

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. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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with Chris Harrison on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Noel. Is Noel one of my altars?

No. He's his own dude. Okay. Do you have altars? No. Okay. Do you? No, not that I know of.

I think we've each seen a bit of an altar in each other, but that's just called us being jerks every now and then. Bad mood. Yeah, that's a little different. Yeah, it is. I was on a forum about a forum for people with Dissociative Identity Disorder, and from what I was reading, sometimes you feel crowded.

Some people have felt like they have had altars like their whole life as long as they've been around. Interesting. 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 as people, and another person responded,

and said that that's often like an early stage of the process, and then over time, as they become more pronounced, they end up adopting names. Or it is Super Moody, or some other bad behavior that you say is Dissociative Identity Disorder, and you give it a name.

Well, you don't, your therapist does. Yeah, or you might, but yeah. So it's controversial, and we'll get to that, but I guess we should start off by saying that another name for this, a more popular name, even though it's been, since 1994, DID, the original name was Multiple Personality Disorder. Right.

So it's split personality. Yeah, when I was reading this at first, I was like, sounds an awful lot like split personality. Right. That's like, oh, it is. It is, they just renamed it, and we'll see pretty soon why, 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 and abuse. Yeah. So much so that now there's a lot of people who doubt that it's a real thing. Right. 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. Wow. Yeah, there's this excellent article on I09 actually

about, I think it's called like the myth of dissociative identity disorder, and- The myth of multiple personality disorder. Thank you. They went old school. Yeah, and the lady who wrote it did a really good job of explaining the controversy around it,

and also like the renewal of it as well, like how it became renewed. But yeah, it was because it was basically- Exploited. And fictionalized. Yeah, yeah. By the psychiatric community. Yeah, 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 period of exploitation from the 50s to the 80s. Yeah. So you have probably a pretty good idea of the concept behind it of the disorder to begin with.

It's a single person has their normal, their original, what's called their host personality. Yeah. And sometimes, especially under periods of acute psychosocial stress, maybe confronted with stress or something they don't wanna think about or talk about or whatever,

another one of their personalities will emerge. Yeah, and they're generally tied to a trauma and early life that you may not even know about until you have a therapy that out of your subconscious. Right. They believe that for dissociative identity disorder, when it does come about from the result of the trauma, it comes about as a coping mechanism

to protect the mind, because the host personality simply can't handle dealing with it. But there is some 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 the person

is confronted with those memories. Yeah, and it can express itself in different ways, depending on how severe your disorder is. But generally, if you've ever seen the United States of Tara, you ever seen that? No, I know of it, but I've never seen an episode. Emily was way into it. Yeah.

We're talking about completely new people, but your behavior, your speech, you can be a different sex. You can have a different accent. Different species? Yeah, you could be like a dog. Yeah. Technically.

I think that's a little more rare. I would imagine. Yeah. And there is no timetable that doesn't necessarily happen like right after a trauma can come out years later. Right. And it just, there's not an awareness necessarily. Or that's a big one.

Well, there's not an awareness of, the 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. Right.

And that was like it was in United States of Tara. Yeah. Sometimes 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 the host personality. Yeah. And there's usually at least two others.

There has to be two, a host and at least one other. Not two others, two total. Right. But then it can go, people have reported up to a hundred or beyond. Yeah. And they can happen at the same time too. Yeah.

That's another thing is they can switch between them pretty quickly. And these periods where the altars emerge can take place over the course of days or weeks. Basically, 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's undergoing.

Yeah. Maybe calling back that previous trauma, maybe not, it might just be triggered by stress. Right. Period. And you said also that 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. Yeah. Sometimes they don't like the host or they don't have much respect for the host or like one of the 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 shows

that these altars are aware 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 the whole. Well, you can be the host person that just the regular Josh is a non-drinker and you could have an alcoholic altar

that thinks the host is a square and like I can't wait to get my hands on a drink because Josh is like, he won't go near the stuff. Right. But now that I'm Randy, I'm gonna buy that 12 pack of Meisterbrow. Yeah. And very, I don't think I've ever had a sip of Meisterbrow.

I had a very long night with it about 15 years ago. Okay. So you might have undergone something that's similar to dissociative disorder. We should say also, when they renamed dissociative disorder in 1994, they also took all of these components that used to make up multiple personality disorder

and split them. So now there's four associated disorders. 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 dissociative amnesia, which is, remember in our amnesia podcast,

that's what I brought this one about. Yeah. 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. Yeah.

That's that, where it's like you don't remember the terrible thing that happened to you. Right. There's also a dissociative fugue. Yeah. 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. It's not just like I'm not gonna come home any longer. It's like you left your life and are a different person. You're leading a different life and it can last days, weeks, months.

Yeah. And then check the fourth one is depersonalization disorder. Right. Which is like you're watching your life as if you're viewing a movie. You're detached. Yeah.

And I think that one, I think these can work together because I know that if you have DID, you definitely have moments of experiencing that one. Yeah. They, like even if you're just the host, you might feel like you're just watching yourself. Yeah.

Instead of being yourself. So 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 that they all appear to be coping mechanisms to protect the mind from a trauma. Yeah.

They're basically saying like, I'm checking out of my life or I'm detaching myself from my life or I'm just not gonna remember that part of my life. Right. Or I can't handle my life and this other personality can. Yeah.

And it's not always just those things. You know, some of the side symptoms can be hallucinations. A lot of times it leads to substance abuse or eating disorders, depression and anxiety and mood swings obviously, obvi and memory disturbances, either short or long term. Right.

It's kind of one of the keys probably. Yeah. And you apparently a person suffering from dissociative identity disorder, just kind of like you said, foggy. Yeah. A good descriptor of if not life, then their periods of this condition flaring up, I guess.

Yeah. Just their sense of place and times completely disrupted. Yeah. It sounds awful. Yeah. It is awful. Yeah, it is. Like I said, I haven't seen United States of Tara,

but apparently it gets a lot of comic effect out of. Yeah, of course. But if you have dissociative identity disorder, you 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 alters,

but it also shows the toll that it takes on the family and stuff like that. Yeah. So this has been around for a little while. We've understood it's symptoms since at least the late 18th century. Yeah. And some early scientists and researchers

did a pretty good job considering how long ago it was nailing it. Well, it's a pretty like extravagant case. Yeah, I'm sure doctors, especially in the 1800s and 1700s, were like pretty excited about it. Yeah. So demonic possession and weird things like that back in the day, many of those cases

may have been things like these disorders. We just didn't know about it back then, so we just said someone was a hysteric or a witch. Right. And they killed them. Yeah. Or locked them up in some room. Yeah.

But the first symptoms of DID came around in 1791. It's a long time ago. Yeah. A guy named Eberhardt Gamelin. No. Yeah, Gamelin. Yeah. I think it's GME-LIN.

I would go silent G on that. Mellon? 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 is a middle class German woman who had an alter who is a French aristocrat.

So he hypnotized her, brought out the French aristocrat. He animal magnetized her, or mesmerism. Yeah. Yeah. And we did an episode on hypnosis if you want to go check that out. Yeah. It's a very good one.

But up until the late 1800s, about 1880, 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 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 and the subconscious. Because, I mean, still today, people believe the subconscious exists and that it's the one that's really run in the show. Oh, really?

Is that still the belief that it's greater? As far as I know, certainly among Freudians. But yeah. That's true. I don't think anyone's really discredited the idea of the subconscious. All right. Who knows?

Well, I'm sure we're going to find out here or there. About the same time as that was going on, they started to tie it with childhood trauma, which is pretty spot on. And then a French patient named Louis Vive. Vive? Yeah. Vive?

He was 22 years old and he had, this is in the late 1800s, had six personalities. Doctors just went crazy over this guy. Yeah. They didn't overlap with their memories. They thought that they were just hypnotic variations 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 really kind of follow the timeline of DID, like they were, we've come back to that understanding of it. Yeah, I guess you're right. That it's not just different personalities. It's just different aspects of a single personality that are kind of given voice in a very literal,

like different voices in a literal way. Right. Yeah, that's a good point. And then after that, actually around the same time, Pierre Genette, another French researcher, said, no, these are different personalities and it comes from a trauma that they suffered. Right.

So he was kind of hit it early on. Yeah, I guess he laid the groundwork for the understanding for the next century or so to come. Yeah. And then it wasn't until 1905 that somebody claimed to cure a person with dissociative identity disorder. Again, back then known as multiple personality disorder. Yeah.

A guy named Morton Prince. Morty Prince. Not Martin Prince. Morton Prince. That's right. He basically said that using hypnosis, he was able to coax out the very easily coax out the altars. Yeah.

Because this is something like very early on, dissociative identity disorder and hypnosis were basically just went hand in hand. Yeah. And alienists believed that they could use hypnosis to very easily draw out the altars, which they could. Yeah. Who am I talking to now?

Exactly. Or I want to talk to this personality and then start confronting those personalities and convincing them to integrate into the host personality. And then once you had full successful integration, you had a reunited whole host person who was just one personality. Yeah.

But the key is that they're using hypnosis. Right. And hypnosis isn't real. Right. So we have a huge clue here to a mystery of what exactly is going on. But before anybody really faces that and confronts it and starts to really, truly treat

dissociative 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 and doubled down on the most the sexiest, craziest versions it can come up with. Yeah, yeah. And it did this in the 50s. And we'll tell you how right after this message.

I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention.

Because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in. And let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world

came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good, there is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Attention, Bachelor Nation.

He's back. The man who hosted some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with a brand new Tell All podcast. The most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison. It's going to be difficult at times. It'll be funny. We'll push the envelope. But I promise you this, we have a lot to talk about.

For two decades, Chris Harrison saw it all. And now he's sharing the things he can't unsee. I'm looking forward to getting this off my shoulders and repairing this, moving forward, and letting everybody care for me. What does Chris Harrison have to say now? You're going to want to find out. I have not spoken publicly for two years about this.

And I have a lot of thoughts. I think about this every day. Truly, every day of my life, I think about this and what I want to say. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Chuck, psychiatry is about to say multiple personality

disorder is exactly what it looks like. Some of these people are beyond loony. This guy over here has 100 personalities. And seven of them are dogs, different dogs. Can you believe this? And these cases are going to start to grow by leaps and bounds and number. And it all can be traced back to a single book, which

is based on a 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 was a book written in 1957 by two psychiatrists. And it was about a woman whose real name was Chris Costner Sizemore.

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 had looked and nobody, all of our 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. Oh, OK. So she, Chris Costner Sizemore, went by 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 Sizemore.

Just Kevin Costner. Yeah. Did I say Eva White? I meant Eve White. Yeah. I might say Eve. Either way, it's Eve White. And she was referred because she had headaches, amnesia.

And she worked with these two 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.

There was a big blockbuster movie. 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. For the first time, it was everyone, like you said, it's kind of super sexy and interesting. Yeah. And people were captivated by this new disease.

And this Eve woman, who was really three women in one. Right. There was Eve Peggy. And I can't remember the other one. But one was like a good girl. The other one was like a bad girl or a tough girl. And then the host was just kind of a combination of the two. Yeah.

And she's still alive. She still is? Yeah. Wow. Well, she, so this doctor, was it Thigpen? Yeah. Dr. Thigpen, who was treating her, Corbett Thigpen and a colleague, I believe his name is Hennie Cleckley.

Seriously. Cleckley and Thigpen. So Thigpen was the one who wrote, like, really went off the deep end with the book and then sold the lady's life rights without her approval to Hollywood. Yeah. And they made this story or this movie.

And like you said, it was. To 20th Century Fox. Yeah. It was, and it was, it made a pretty big splash, both the book and the movie. And she came out and wrote a book called I'm Eve and said, dude, this guy's a total fraud. Like, yes, I do have multiple personalities.

Right. But they didn't cure me. No. Yeah. Like this guy kept insisting I was cured. It didn't work. He shot me up a sodium penithal and, like, just used the power of suggestion.

And he's just a huckster, basically. He was after the story. But here I am left with my condition still. Yeah. And she had reportedly suffered, witnessed a bad accident and witnessed two deaths as a child. And that's where hers was born. So that set the stage for popular consciousness

to kind of come to understand multiple personality disorder, which, again, that's what it was called at the time. And I mean, it was all over the place. Like, people just, people were just aware of it. Whereas they hadn't been before. And it was kind of like a one-two punch. You had all about Eve in the 50s. Yeah.

And then about 15 years later, you had Sybil. And Sybil was the one that blew this thing wide open. Sally Field. It just happened, I guess, to arrive at a time when America was really ready to undergo or be party to psychological exploitation like big time. Yeah. And in 1973 is when Sybil the book came out, written by.

Oh, let's see. Flora Rita Schreiber. About her treatment with psychiatrist Cornelia Wilbur. Yeah. And about the treatment of the real name was Shirley Mason. And they kept that a secret for many years. Sybil. Yeah, to protect her identity.

But eventually, the name came out. Right. Well, she died in the 90s. Yeah, she died in 98 of breast cancer. But she had 16 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 70s. Yeah, it was huge. Huge. Yeah. And she was actually an artist, a painter. And taught painting, too, I think. But they found 103 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 painted. Oh, wow. So many of them are unsigned. But when you look at it, it's really like they're all different. Like some are like real, some are abstract, some are impressionistic, really all over the map.

And it's just, I don't know, kind of a testament to how real this can be. Is there a website that hosts all of them? I don't know. I think if you just look up hidden paintings of Sibyl, you can probably buy them. And that would be what S-I-B-Y-L is how they spell that. No, S-Y-B-I-L.

Yeah. Yeah. So Sibyl is a smash hit. It's based on the wave, the first wave that was brought about by All About Eve. And the public is just fully aware of multiple personality disorders. Like these two are like the cream of the crop.

There were tons of made for TV movies and Donahue episodes and all sorts of just chatter about multiple personality disorder. And all of a sudden, the cases go from about 200 in the medical literature to suddenly 8,000 after the movie Sibyl comes out. 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 were fortunately a cadre of serious psychiatrists and psychologists who said, wait a minute, what's going on here? Like movies aren't supposed to trigger outbreaks of disorders. Some people explained it away by saying, well, these people may have been suffering like this.

They didn't have a name to associate with it. The movie gave them the name so they could go to the doctor and speak to it and be treated. That is one explanation. The problem is the explanation that this was a real phenomenon and not like some sort of, what are they called? I guess outbreak of mass hysteria a little bit. And this is in no way to diminish anybody suffering

mentally in any way. Yeah, yeah, of course. But I'm talking about the specific moment in history in the 70s in the West where there was an outbreak of multiple personality disorder cases. The idea that it was a real thing was definitely undermined by the Sibyl case itself, which contemporaneously some psychiatrists said, this isn't a peer reviewed case

history. We think this is basically all just made up. Well, the lid was blown off specifically by a single doctor in Sibyl's case. Dr. Herbert Spiegel apparently treated Sibyl, well, let's not have a real name, but we'll call her Sibyl, while the 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. It seems like you gave her sodium penithal 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 was at least one instance where that fill-in doctor who was treating Sibyl said that they were in a session and Sibyl said, which personality do you want me to be, which is not something you say when you can't control your altars. And then secondly, in the case notes, there was a reference to a note or a statement by Sibyl to her doctor, Dr. Wilbur, that said, I do not even have a double.

I am all of them. I have been lying in my pretense of them. And Dr. Wilbur noted that she wrote this up to avoidance behavior, that Sibyl was trying to avoid having to confront reintegrating her personalities. And that's why she was saying that she was lying. So when all of this came out and was added up and combined with this outbreak of multiple personality disorder cases in

the late 70s, early 80s, it was pretty damning. But then when it became obvious that satanic ritual abuse, that moral panic that happened, was following right on the heels of this, I think the scientific community stepped back and said, OK, America's is crazy. Well, in not in the mental health problem kind of way, like just crazy. Yeah, I think a lot of that came about because it started

to become a legal defense. And people started explaining 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? Dude, this Lifetime Movie Network is all over these stories. Yeah.

I bet you there's quite a few of those movies out there. Right. So all this is going on, it becomes very apparent that this isn't a real thing. 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 going to rename it dissociative identity

disorder. We're going to completely remove it from what just happened because that was pitiful. Yeah. And we're going to get down to basics. We're going to go back to the way of addressing this, of viewing this, that the doctor who described Louis Viver came up with all the way back in 1888,

that it's just variations of the host personality, not truly separate personalities. And that if we treat the underlying cause, or even just the comorbid symptoms, like drug addiction, alcoholism, depression, the hallucinations, the mood swings, the anxiety, if we treat all this, most likely the depression identity disorder is also going to be treated in kind. Yeah, I think another thing that lended itself to that,

too, where the doctor started being sued in the 90s by people saying, wait a minute, you've got me on these drugs, you're hypnotizing me, you're saying you're coercing me into calling out these altars, and so I'm going to sue you. Yeah, I'm glad you said that, because it is worth revisiting. I don't think we really laid this at the feet of psychiatrists enough. There were people who saw this movie who were feeling this way,

who maybe felt like they had more than one personality, and went to- And I think everyone feels that way a little bit sometimes. Right. 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 sodium penethol.

Right, you go to a medical professional, that medical professional isn't supposed to be like, yeah, yeah, you have that, and this one's named Tim. Right. Tim is very aggressive personality. Yeah. 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 because of a, at the very least, a dubious medical expert. Yeah. And yeah, 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. Yeah.

You know? This was one of them. But like I said, again, there were a group of psychiatrists who said, no, 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. Yeah. And we'll figure it. We'll talk about how they figured it out right after this. I'm Mangesh Atikular, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking.

You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in, and let me tell you, it got weird fast.

Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed.

Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Attention, Bachelor Nation. He's back. The man who hosted some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with a brand new Tell All podcast,

the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison. It's going to be difficult at times. It'll be funny. We'll push the envelope. But I promise you this, we have a lot to talk about. For two decades, Chris Harrison saw it all. And now he's sharing the things he can't unsee. I'm looking forward to getting this off my shoulders

and repairing this, moving forward, and letting everybody hear from me. What does Chris Harrison have to say now? You're going to want to find out. I have not spoken publicly for two years about this. And I have a lot of thoughts. I think about this every day. Truly, every day of my life, I think about this

and what I want to say. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. OK, Chuck, so now we're at 1994. They've renamed multiple personality disorder. And now it's dissociative identity disorder. So let's talk about how it's treated,

how it manifests, what it is. So I guess the modern understanding from what I can tell seems to be that dissociative identity disorder is a person who has, well, let's talk about personality. What identity is? OK. What if your identity is basically a script that you've been equipped with that's

been developed and refined in nuance, but also very much brutalized and solidified over the years so that when you are faced with anything in life, you're going to react in a prescribed, predictable way. OK. That's your identity. Now, what if your identity is such that it doesn't handle stress very well?

That's true. But you're still confronted with stress. Yeah. But that doesn't, but handling stress 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 to deal with that stress. And it might cuss out the person, like a psychiatrist who's confronting them with the stress. It 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 are multiple personalities. Right. That's 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, that's not real?

I don't think the word real is a good word. Because I think to that person, it's real. And that's reality right there. I mean, 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 80s. Everybody was just kind of playing along. But I think if you actually 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 to view dissociative identity disorder in order to treat it. That it isn't that they aren't separate personalities. Because you can basically, 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 going to be able to treat it. Did you find anyone famous with it? No, did you? Herschel Walker.

No, really? Yeah, you knew about that, right? No. Famous former Georgia Bulldog running back in NFL star Herschel Walker, he suffers from DID. And he wrote a book called Breaking Free. And he has no memory of winning the Heisman Trophy. Oh, no.

He has no memory of putting a gun to his wife's head, something that's happened in his life. No memory of any of these things. And he says, he has as many as 12 alters. And his wife, I don't know if they're still together. I don't think so. But his wife, many years, thinks like it all makes sense now. Like when she finally, he came out with this.

And he just came out with it a few years ago. Wow. 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. Wow. And she was like, it was not a mood swing.

And he's famous for not just being a football player. Like he was into ballet. He went to FBI school. He was an Olympic bobsledder. What? He's done all these things. He's a mixed martial artist now. And he thinks that these alters are basically

why he has so many varying interests in life. Well, yeah. That is really fascinating. Herschel. So what do you think about it? What's your take on dissociative identity disorder? Well, I'm not sure I'd see the difference between, like that's what a mental 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 touch it. Right. So if someone believes they have four different personalities, then they may as well have four different personalities.

Well, there's. 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. Right. Exactly. I think the fact that when I see cases of what looks like real DID, like Herschel Walker,

no memory of certain things. Right. Like it's certainly more powerful than that's bad Chuck coming out because I don't deal with stress well. Right. We'll call him Tony. You know? Right.

But if I blacked out and didn't remember my actions for several days and those actions included putting a gun to my wife's head, then that's a whole different thing. Yeah. You know? Because I'm certainly moody. We all know bad Chuck. We all 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 bar at housestuffworks.com and they'll bring up this article.

And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this real world advice for Tony. This guy's name's Tony. Oh, no way. Yeah. Total accident. Hey, guys. I recently returned to the states from living

in the Republic of Korea, mostly teaching English there for the last 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 in marketing, sales, business development, finance, consulting.

Anyway, I find most of those roles to be too boring. I also feel pressured and burdened 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, 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 or pretty certain that that advanced degree will improve my situation. So I'm emailing you guys because I'm an advertiser. And I think we share similar perspectives on things. And you have great careers that are thrilling and aspirable. True that. So I'm not quite saying I want to be you guys or I want your jobs, but I see you both as people

that are really interesting, salt of the earth folk who can relate to my situation, more so than my investment management consulting law, you're in med school friends. So Tony DeFridis wants to know what he should do. Man, that's a tough one. I've actually been thinking about this dude's email for a couple of days now. Oh, yeah?

Yeah. OK. I mean, like he's asking for help. Sure. So give it to him. Well, my first bit of advice would be to narrow down your scope a little bit. If you study in 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 down based on, I often tell people, like, what do you love? Yeah.

And what would you love to do ideally? Right. 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 40,000 foot level. Like, maybe you should sit for a little while

with a legal pen, a pen, and, like, be quiet and gather your thoughts. Yeah. And then brainstorm after that. Just even for, like, a half hour, 20 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 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 who go to college don't use the degree that they got. It's more like they went to college to show they can go through college, you know?

Yeah. And he didn't list engineer anywhere in what he was looking into, even though that's what his degree's in. Yeah. Here's the other thing, too. There are very few career choices or life paths that go absolutely nowhere.

And you shouldn't be afraid to take steps that aren't necessarily the prescribed way to go. Yeah. And don't be worried about locking yourself in for life necessarily, you know? Like, try something out that you love and it may bear fruit. Yeah. 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 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, sea-captaining, whatever. So, spend some time, be quiet with your thoughts, try and decide what you love, and if you could make a career out of that, and if we hear anything, then we'll let you know.

It sounds like you're up for adventure because you lived in Korea for Garden Seed. Yeah. We give them 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. If you have made any kind of life choice or decision based on something Chuck and I had 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.com slash stuffyoushouldknow. Send us an email to stuffpodcastatdiscovery.com,

check out our Josh and Chuck YouTube channel, and hang out with us at our home on the web. Stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit our website at www.thedayfarm.org. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life.

Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.