WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The Social Mediators: Dissociative Identity Disorder

Episode Date: March 29, 2025

This week we discuss Dissociative Identity Disorder along with the symptoms and cause of the rare disorder (not disease, Jillian...). Tune in to hear about the social media stories that both illuminate and confound the truth of the affliction, the difficulty of diagnosis, and whether or not wolves can be alters. 

This is the social mediators on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Jillian. And I'm Garrett. And today we are talking about a disorder. Is that what we're going to call it? Is it a disorder? Yeah, it's a disorder. A mental disorder called dissociative identity disorder, D.I.D., as it's referred to frequently on TikTok.

This is an interesting one for social media because this hit its prime in the COVID-2020, 2021 era, where it was just very popular to be. diagnosed with this illness. And then Garrett was asking me if I'd ever heard of it. And I was like, oh, I've heard of it. That's mind-blowing to me. Because this is, you know, as a psychology student, when you talk about D-I-D, it's like, here's this pretty rare disorder that, you know, it's only under extreme circumstances does it occur?

And now we have all these people on social media coming out and saying, either there's an increase in liars or an increase in extreme circumstances. I don't know which one it could possibly be. I'm going to start us off just by talking about some of the things I found on social media about D-I-D and then Garrett's going to come in and hopefully correct some things I've found. If it's all true, I'm going to be shocked. I will be, this one especially, I will be shocked if social media is. I can't imagine.

So one thing that's really, I think, prominent at the forefront of this disorder is the fact that people when they talk about it use the word we. They say we. They refer to themselves as a we. They think of themselves in a fragmented sort of way. And the components that seem to have come forward in my watching and scrolling are there's a host, a person who is who fronts more often, I think is what they kept saying. They were saying, who's fronting right now, as in the person who's presenting the person who's the most conscious, it seems. There are two different, how do I say, ways that you're to describe the experience. Some people say they just have complete amnesia. They say it's more rare to have these moments where they have amnesia where they just forget everything that's

happening if they're not the person that's front, the altar that's fronting. Altars, in other word, they use a lot, which is the different facets of somebody's identity that are presenting at a given time. And when people are fronting, the other altars can't, I guess, remember. what's happening in that moment. But other people have described it as just feeling like you're in the backseat of a car watching someone else drive as kind of this, as you may imagine, dissociative, out-of-body experience is what people say a lot. Is this out-of-body experience you're watching yourself in third person?

The shifts that happen between altars, they range from very dramatic where the person is like eyes rolling back in the head, falling asleep, putting their head on their arms to like waking up or just like closing your eyes and doing kind of a long blink and then opening and them reassociating with reality there are more dramatic versions of this they're in all of the people that i saw that were having these tic-tok accounts with systems because these tic-tac accounts are very popular where it's called like the something system they give themselves a name but it's just meant to describe the system that they're a part of and every system hasn't a protector somebody who's I guess the protector.

One that's the trauma holder, apparently, and the trauma holder from what I can tell is not allowed to say what the trauma is. They're not allowed to, like, tell the other altars, and they're not allowed to tell other people what the trauma is that they're trying to hold onto. And it seems like they may be the only one in the whole system who knows what triggered this disorder. Speaking of which, it seems that this is a disorder that happens when people experience extreme, like, child abuse.

is what seems to happen. Is there some sort of PTSD and childhood where this is a remedy to that as a way of kind of not coping with bad memories is they just have one faceted their identity that holds on to the bad feelings and the rest of them that are different. Where it's, oh, and there's also this idea of co-consciousness where multiple altars, I guess, are at the front that somebody talked about where it's like sometimes the host is also conscious with another person at the same time. I don't know what that looks like.

I never got to see that. where it gets really social media-e and where I seem to have a bit less empathy. The people that are talking about it, it sounds really horrible. The situation in the way of living sounds absolutely miserable. But where I lose a little bit of empathy is a certain kind of person who has this disease. I keep saying disease. It's not a disease. It's a disorder.

My goodness gracious. But they're always trans. There are always a couple different hair colors going on. And they're always, this is the thing, hyper fixated on the pronouns, names, and species of the altar that is presenting at the time. There's always, there's a lot of people that have within their system, men, women, children, etc. Some people, such as the Wonderland System, which for people on social media, the Wonderland System is the one that everybody is most familiar with because they went viral back in the, day for what looked like faking like majorly faking this by saying that they had a couple different species happening in the system there was a wolf as you maybe would expect i don't remember what

the other species were and actually didn't care enough to look um but they're when they describe who the different altars are they're always like this one is a human girl because they have to specify human and all the names this is where i really get annoyed a lot of the names are Asian names they're like white people with Asian anime inspired names, which actually happens a lot in the trans community as well, trans people who adopt some sort of Asian name. I don't know the reason for this. I don't know the correlation nor the causation, but I know that this is something that's pretty prevalent in the scrolling that I did. And like one person that I saw, I'm going to show Garrett a picture right now, was literally using a filter, a TikTok filter to put horns on their head.

and the name of the altar was beast pronouns he they it that's one of their altars in their DID system so there's kind of a range of people that you're dealing with some that i'm like yeah that makes that sounds horrible that sounds normal something like you're 13 and you're very troubled and the names that they're calling themselves are like snail and beast like that's the kind of thing that we're dealing with on the other hand. A really popular interview went viral back on the day in 2021 where a man named Anthony Padilla interviewed a girl. I think her name's Nin. I think that's the host. And that got a lot of hate because it seemed very fake. I don't know if it was fake. I actually have zero clue. She seemed genuine to me, but a lot of people were like, this is just very fake seeming. She had an altar

named Kyle who was, all the altar, all the systems seem to have one altar who's like some sort of player, some sort of male like womanizer, very typically. There's always a child alter as well, which is an interesting thought. But then there's also TikToks, a lot of TikToks that are coming out now, like to four or five years later that are saying things like, I wish I could go back in time and stop my 13 year old self from convincing myself I had DID and unironically had upwards of 500 altars, one of which being Charlie Demalia. Like that's the sort of thing that we were seeing back in 2020 where people are like and this altar is Charlie Demalia and you're like I really want to have more empathy for you than I do in this situation. But there actually are a lot of normal people

showing what looks like really difficult situations having to deal with this. One girl described what it's like to go to sleep and take a nap. Describe the experience of dissociating and then coming back to front as like going to sleep and taking a nap and waking up in completely different clothes unaware of what's happened in the past couple days and just like not really sure what you're feeling or what you're in the middle of. It looked really stressful, but also a lot of it looked kind of fake. One was a one story I thought that really stressed me out was this idea of a mother who had to, who had a five-year-old and she had to use bracelets that she would put on her arms to signify which version of herself she was. So like if she was her words like happy mom,

she would wear like yellow. But if she was like in a, playful mood where she felt like she was like 17 years old she would wear the orange one if she was nonverbal she would wear the clear one like there were different colors that signified how she was feeling and she has a child and a husband and she didn't find this out this is the part that i find as interesting is that there are stories of people not finding out until they're late 20s 30s i do not understand how you go through your whole life with this if it's as extreme as a lot of the cases are making it seem where it's like you live with nine different people in your body i don't understand how you wouldn't be able to find that out to later in life, but it seems to be that's some of it.

One of the TikToks I saw was somebody who was like, this is how I cope with my dissociative identity disorder. And they were talking about how they like just write everything down and they write it down everywhere and they have journals and different scraps of paper that they keep track of things. And I'm like, so this is the movie Memento by Christopher Nolan. That's real life, crazy. But that's actually what they do. I don't know how much of it is genuine.

I don't know how much of it is just kind of a social phenomenon, a kind of contagion of like, Yeah, I went through hard stuff when I was a kid, so I probably want to disassociate into this other person right now who doesn't have to think about their trauma versus it being like an actual purely somatic or psychosomatic response where you don't have a ton of control over it. I don't really know the difference there. So I have a big question for you. Go ahead. Very important is do you get the sense that the people that are claiming to have this disorder also struggle with like major depression? Oh, certainly. every single person certainly has some sort of like additional mental there's a lot of narcissistic

personality disorder that people have talked about bipolar depression anxiety there's a lot of like gender dysphoria a lot of that which actually i think really bleeds into the like situation with every alter having different sets of pronouns um yeah that's that is the sense that i get for sure i don't know if those that's normal or typical, but Garrett's going to tell us on the social mediators on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Jillian. And I'm Garrett. And we're talking about disassociative identity disorder. Take it away, Garrett. Yeah, so let's talk about what it is. We'll talk about causes. And then we'll talk about how it seems like social media is presenting it and maybe what's true and what is maybe a bit misleading. So it's a mental health condition that occurs. You were exactly right from extreme abuse.

And essentially the theory behind what causes a disease. Now, here's the tricky thing is that we can't. It's a very hard thing to study because, you know, no one's like pulling the kid out of the abusive situation and being like, okay, let's run some tests and see what happens. Right. But what seems to be the case is that when children typically between the ages of five and ten, so pretty young and even younger go through incredibly traumatic, physically abusive, emotionally abusive circumstances, part of the, their personality will essentially split off to protect them. It is, it is what they call an ego defense mechanism, right, a way to protect your, your sense of self. And that's where you get the result of this disease, which is that oftentimes you have multiple personalities that don't

share memories. And so you're exactly right on that, that there typically is a personality that kind of harbors the, whatever the traumatic memory is. Now, the idea that they can't share is kind of interesting. In fact, one of the main modes of therapy for this disease is actually getting whatever altar is holding the memory to talk about it. So it is certainly not true that they can't. If they're unwilling, that's not surprising. It would be self-imposed, potentially. Yes, self-imposed, but not surprising that they wouldn't want to. These are incredibly, we're talking about, you know, there's abuse and then there's the abuse that causes this disorder. I kind of it's a different caliber. So let's here, okay, we'll take an example from, uh, from cinema,

Right. Jason Bourne's character is based off of someone with dissociative identity disorder. Okay. And his story is loosely based off of some like conspiracies about what happened to, you know, orphan children or something. You know, they're not sure that governments would experiment on people essentially to try to induce this disorder to make really great spies, right? The Soviet Union is particularly notorious for potentially having tried this. And the methods described to, like I'm not going to describe them in detail, but we're talking. about actual torture, right? We're not talking about like, oh, my mom yelled at me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is very, very serious abuse. So that's kind of broadly what it is, right, is that one or

more personalities will harbor various aspects of the childhood trauma so that the front, right, the person that, kind of the main personality that typically bears the name, the given name of the person, doesn't have to cope with those issues on a day-to-day basis. There are different manifestations of this. There's different patterns. There's what's called a mutually cognizant pattern, which is that all the identities are aware of each other. And that's why this disorder actually often takes a long time to get diagnosed because it looks like schizophrenia. Because they're like, oh, I hear voices. And like they kind of are hearing voices. It's just the other alters in their head. That is something people talked about is like I hear somebody like, it was kind of in a joke

format where they're like, somebody's roasting me right now. Somebody is in my head like telling me and to me I'm like oh those are just intrusive thoughts is is there a difference between those two things you know the difference is the their brain's ability to dissociate the two so cognitively what's likely taking place is pretty much the same as what you and I experience as an intrusive thought but when you and this is actually true for schizophrenia also the reason why schizophrenic people hear a voice that sounds like a different voice is that their brain has has become unable to distinguish the, the, the, it's become hyper rational, essentially. So, oh, I can't explain that voice from a rational way. There must be another voice talking to me, you know.

So a similar thing is happening, at least as far as researchers can tell in dissociative identity disorder. Now, here's the really weird thing that makes it, so the way you tell somebody who actually has this disorder from, from kind of somebody who's faking, is that the altars will possess different physiological conditions than the main personality. So what do I mean by that? I mean that let's say somebody is in their main personality and you take their blood pressure, right? And then let's say they have a protector personality who is like a large adult man that's kind of overweight by this kind of big imposing figure. And just personality. Yes, just the personality. Right. So and they switch personalities over to this protector figure.

it is often the case that their blood pressure will actually change to match someone. That is insane. So, yeah, that's where it gets really confusing and strange. And is this real? But also kind of more concrete, right? It is more concrete in that way. Yeah. And that's so interesting because when you see people on social media who claim to have this

disease disorder, it's so, it makes it seem more fake when they come in with a big accent and a different sort of like physical presence. It makes it seem more fake to me that they're just playing different characters, but maybe that's an actual manifestation of an internal sort of change that's happening there. Yeah, so vocabulary is often a sign. The way that this is diagnosed, typically,

is that family members of the individual are consulted and they ask, are there times when they use vastly different words than they normally would? Are there times when their mood is wildly different? So those are some key things that doctors, will try to pinpoint. Can I ask if accents are a real thing that change? They certainly could be.

From what I saw, that seems pretty rare. It's so common with these. Yeah, it seems not incredibly common from what I read and saw. Okay. And so there's a couple other things that can help us tell real from fake in this instance. We call comorbidities, right? These things all have to be true. And one of the experts that I listen to, she's,

currently writing what will be the only medical book on dissociative identity disorder when it's finished. And what she said was that the kind of the difference between the real and the people that are pretending, because you mentioned the social media phenomenon, is that multiple things have to be true at once for to really be dissociative identity disorder. So you have lapses in memory, like major amnesic episodes. And it's not just like, oh, I'm forgetful, right? Because some people are forgetful.

And it's not just dissociation because there are other dissociative disorders. You talk about fugue states. You talk about these times when people, they seem like they're watching somebody else live their life. That's something a little bit different. Now, if you have that coupled with these amnesic episodes where you really don't know where you were or what you were doing, like the waking up and wearing something different, that's absolutely a symptom of like real DID. That's crazy. So there's those things. And then all, I think in every, just about every case, there is major, major depression.

a lot of times post-traumatic stress. And we're talking about depression that doesn't respond to other treatment. That's kind of the unusual thing is that usually even really intractable depression. Depression will respond to some kind of treatment or drugs or things like that. A lot of times their depression will not. In fact, the suicide rate among people that have real the ID is extraordinarily high. I can imagine. 70 to 80% of all people.

Wow. I also can't imagine living that way and how difficult that might be. Yes. to like go through life with only pieces of what you know to be true. That's so interesting. So another pattern that can take place is so you have the mutually cognizant pattern. They all know each other. You have a one way and music pattern, which is pretty uncommon from what I could find. And essentially that is that one or more of the altars are aware of the main, but the main one is not aware of the others or vice versa. So like the main altar could know,

okay, there's five others, but the five others aren't aware of each other or of the main one. So that creates a lot of confusion. I don't know if I saw as many of those on social media. Everybody on social media seemed to be aware of all the other alter. Well, not all of them. They had an idea sort of about them. They were like, there could be some. I don't know.

But they know that there were some others. Yeah. And then the last pattern is mutually amnesic, which is that none of them are aware of each other. This is the most rare, but apparently it can happen. This is completely like if you've seen Moon Night, right? It's Moon Night. He has no idea what's going on when he's the other thing that goes and kills people. Yeah, and so here's another interesting piece that I think we should take note of in looking at social media's account of the disease is that the rapid switching between personalities, like the close your eyes and now I'm somebody else or kind of like my head nods off.

That is extremely uncommon. Okay. That was everybody, unfortunately. The switches and personality, they're not so sudden. They're not extremely noticeable. And, like, you would be hard pressed, I think, in most cases, unless you are trying. trained therapist be able to tell when somebody was switching, when the switch was taking place. That's so bizarre because everybody has a, there's just a big show about it where it's like

they're falling asleep, they're waking up, they're reassociating. Like you can watch every step of it happen. And it can happen that way. It's not impossible, but it's very unusual. Hmm. It seems to be the most usual, at least via social media. Is the animal thing valid? I ran across nothing about altars that were animals, which is telling. I don't, I don't think that in documented research about people that have real dissociative identity disorder that animal alters are a part of it. I'm not saying this is pure scientific fact, but all of the accounts I saw had in their bios, again, not in fact, but like diagnosed DID.

They wanted people to know that they were diagnosed with this. So that's almost certainly bogus because there's like, you know, like a tiny number of physicians that actually are qualified to diagnose dissociative identity disorder. Even a lot of psychiatrists aren't trained to do it. it's pretty it's in terms of how rare it is that actually is kind of in question it actually might be more common than we think but the severity that inspires hollywood uh or certain teenagers on social media is right incredibly uncommon yeah um and the last thing i wanted to mention was the age at which this disease is typically diagnosed you actually got it right it is actually usually diagnosed in the 20s or 30s because it's in younger children it's really easily

mistaken for a bipolar disorder for ADHD for a host of other things. So typically when a kid has this disorder and it, you know, it wouldn't start to really develop until post trauma, right? It's not something you're born with. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So post trauma and it just looks like a lot of other things that kids have at first. Is, are the names something that just come to them when they become the altar or is it something that's assigned by like the host? How do, how are the names and pronouns happening in this situation? That's an excellent question. that I do not have an answer to. I don't know. My guess is that the host, if he is aware, he or she is aware of the other altars, just assigns a name.

From what I saw, the most convincing case from what I saw was that mother I told you about, just because it was really, she's had a lot of different things that she was saying. And she didn't have names. She had emotions that she was feeling and more, she had proclivities that she would fall into more so. She had ages that she associated them with, older, younger, but there were no names, pronouns, species, differentiations between them. But are there, can one person, can one system have multiple different genders within it? Yes, multiple genders is common. Multiple ages is also common.

Having a child that is around the age that the trauma was experienced is very common. Yeah, that seems to be a thing. Yes. All right. Well, are we ready of social media grade? I think so. Okay. Three, two, one.

C. Yeah. Me. Had some information, but it is, I, I. I think it's going to contribute to a lot of misinformation about the nature and how common it is and how much agency people have in kind of contracting this sort of thing. Agreed. This is not fun.

This is really not something that you bandy about on social media because it's interesting. I mean, it's monetized in its own way. I just, I did have a lot of basic information that I was able to deduce from people who felt more genuine and who had more information about it. But there's just a lot of people on there who are representing it in a strange way. All right. Well, thank you so much to everybody who tuned into the social mediators on Radio Free Hillsdale, 1.1.7 FM. We hope you enjoyed listening to us talk about DID, and we will talk to you next week.