Multiple Personality Disorders

Multiple Personality Disorder – An Insight

Multiple Personality Disorder is perhaps one of the most discussed mental disorders, something that is probably a result of the widespread acclaim commanded by the famous book, Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

And while the condition was quite monumentally dramatized in the case of the book, actual features and characteristics of the disorder are not all that dissimilar from those portrayed in the book. It would be relevant to here acknowledge that Multiple Personality Disorder is contemporaneously referred to as the Dissociative Personality Disorder.

Salient Aspects of the Disease

One of the most basic aspects of the Multiple Personality Disorder is that it brings about dissociation between a person’s usually active personality traits and those that tend to typically be dormant. Individuals suffering from Multiple Personality Disorders tend to experience distortions of consciousness and subsequently, behavior. These distortions are immediately influenced by the alternation of the two separate states of awareness and/or personality states.

The fundamental relevance of these distortions, however, lies in the dramatic degree to which they alter the consciousness of the affected individuals.

• Take into consideration, for instance, that people suffering from Multiple Personality Disorder usually adopt the altered awareness of completely distinctive individuals possessing different names, histories and personality traits.
• And while this is something that typically occurs repeatedly in the people suffering from Multiple Personality Disorders, some of the more dramatic cases have even included individuals switching between altered consciousnesses of different genders, sexual orientations, ages and even nationalities.
• Indeed, some extreme cases of the Multiple Personality Disorder have even included individuals swapping between alter egos of animals and aliens.

The significance of this, moreover, is something that is emphasized when considering it in light of the fact that individuals suffering from Multiple Personality Disorders may switch between 2 to 10 separate alter identities.

Symptoms of Multiple Personality Disorders

Some of the noteworthy symptoms that are related to people suffering from Multiple Personality Disorders are amnesia, depersonalization, de realization and identity disturbances.

• The first, amnesia is rather unsurprising in as much as the fact that people switching between identities would obviously be unaware of certain situations and factors experienced while under the influence of the other identity or identities.
• People with Multiple Personality Disorders may report such ostensibly inexplicable things as finding items in their house that they can't remember having purchased and finding notes written in different handwritings.
• While depersonalization relates to a surreal feeling of unreality concerning ones physical properties; de realization in Multiple Personality Disorders patients causes them to adopt a distorted impression of their external surroundings such as shapes, colors, buildings, places, structures and even people.
• Identity disturbances, which are the most prevalent characteristic in the significant cases of Multiple Personality Disorders, result from the patient's having split off entire personality traits or characteristics as well as memories.

Identity disturbances usually bring about the sudden shift from one personality into another, especially during situations of uncharacteristic stress or duress.

Treatments Suggested For Multiple Personality Disorder

Some of the widely known techniques for the treatment of multiple personality disorders are psychotherapy, medication and hypnosis. Particularly as a result of the fact that Multiple Personality Disorders usually include anxiety disorders, medication typically entails the prescription of antidepressants and mood balancing drugs.

Hypnosis, on the other hand, is used to recover respectively individual ideas, memories, and tendencies and desires that may be instrumental to the formation of the alter ego in particular. Psychotherapy, however, tends to be hailed as the most relevant treatment, to date, for people suffering from Multiple Personality Disorders.

This is because the psychotherapeutic approach to treating Multiple Personality Disorders calls upon the need to isolate and then address the origin of the imbalance of personality traits. The effectuality of the psychotherapeutic model, moreover, is reflected in as much as the fact that it entails three steps or phases.

There is an initial phase for uncovering and studying the patient's alters followed by a phase within which the particularly traumatic memories are delved into in order to bring the alter egos together. The final stage comprises the consolidation of the patient's newly integrated personality.