Multiple Personality Day

What the day is

Multiple Personality Day is observed on March 5. The condition it refers to is real, serious and widely misunderstood, so this entry sticks to what is actually known about it.

Origin and background

The name is out of date. Multiple personality disorder was renamed dissociative identity disorder in 1994, and the change was substantive rather than cosmetic. The older term implied several complete people sharing a body. The current understanding is close to the opposite: a single identity that failed to integrate, leaving separate states that hold different memories, behaviors and sense of self. The problem is fragmentation, not multiplication.

It is classified among the dissociative conditions, which involve disruptions to the normal continuity of memory, identity and perception. The dominant clinical model links it to severe, repeated trauma in early childhood, on the reasoning that dissociation is a way of surviving something inescapable, and that identity that never had the conditions to consolidate remains in parts.

The research history includes genuine controversy. Diagnoses rose sharply during a period in the 1980s and 1990s associated with recovered-memory techniques now known to be capable of generating false memories, and a minority position holds that clinical suggestion contributes to presentation. That argument is live in the literature and does not mean the condition is invented; it means diagnosis requires care.

Two corrections are worth stating plainly. It is not schizophrenia, which involves psychosis rather than divided identity, and the two are confused constantly in ordinary speech. And people with the condition are not disproportionately dangerous. The pattern in the evidence runs the other way: this is a population with very high rates of having been victimized, and screen portrayals that use it as a device for violence do measurable harm to people seeking help.

How to take part

• Use the current name, dissociative identity disorder.
• Stop using split personality as a synonym for schizophrenia, or for indecision.
• Read an account written by someone who has the condition rather than a thriller.
• Notice how films use it, and what that teaches audiences.
• Encourage anyone struggling with dissociation to speak to a clinician rather than self-diagnosing online.