DID

Recently watched a movie called Sybil. Based on a true story of a girl suffering from split personality or the clinically-correct term, dissociative identity disorder. The movie was very good but the 3-hours is for me just not enough to understand Sybil's childhood predicament that made her split into different personalities so I amazon-ed the novel and again, all the books that are currently in my to-read list will have to wait. (This is madness, I've never had so many books in waiting list - 10 and counting - thanks to the visits to secondhand bookstores during my last Euro Trip.)

Some doctors do not believe in the authenticity of this mental disease, they are of the opinion that the patients are merely exceptionally good actors/manipulators. Maybe they are right, but to give it a benefit of a doubt, and ponder in the possibility that it might be an actual mental disease is much more captivating.

Surviving a living hell, some soul will self-destroy; some will be so broken inside that it shatters into pieces.

The memories of everything that hurts survive in one of the pieces. And the pieces survive as individuals, so as to protect the keeper of the soul or the core personaity (the real person) from dealing with the pain. For if the keeper remembers every detail of his past, he/she will be too traumatized that the future will be too unbearable to go on. The different personalities know and communicate with each other, and they normally work together to keep their keeper from harm. For instance, if the keeper likes to play the piano but has encountered an experience in which a piano is associated with something hurtful (e.g being raped on a piano), all her piano playing abilities is kept with a personality, usually with its own name. The new split personality, while remembering the traumatizing rape experience, will have no problem with playing the piano him/herself; it's like he/she was a third person witnessing from outside the glass window.

In 1970s a man named Billy Milligan used this disease as his defense against several felonies including robbery and sexual assault.

Daniel Keyes, author of Flowers of Algernon, told the man's story in a novel named after the man himself. One of my favourite all-time novels.

Currently, United States of Tara, has renewed into its 3rd seasons, yay. Kudos to Toni Collette (the mom in Little Miss Sunshine) for portraying the transition of her character's different personalities very convincingly. And yeah, it's normal that one of the personalities will turn out to be of a different gender from the core personality; that's when most of the trouble arises.