Episode 101: Introduction
Steven: [00:00:00]
Welcome to the first episode.
The podcast is about living with dissociative identity disorder, or DID.
They used to call it multiple personality disorder, or MPD, but they changed that back in 1994. Let me say something that’s going to surprise you. DID is not a rare disorder. Let me repeat that. DID is not a rare disorder, even though they’ve told us that for years. Mental health experts have found that DID shows up in about 1.5% of the population.
Just think about what that means. That’s approximately 5 million people in the United States and 120 million worldwide,
That puts the disorder at about the same rate as chronic major depressive disorder. , bulimia, nervosa in women. It’s more common than schizophrenia and persistent depressive disorder also called dysthymia. It’s only a [00:01:00] slightly less common than panic disorder and bipolar disorder.
Some cases are more severe than others, but the fact is that the disorder isn’t as rare as once claimed. The odds are that everyone knows someone who has a form of it.
I’ve wanted to do this podcast for a long time because it’s a subject that’s very personal to me. I’ve had the disorder since I was a child. And I got it way back then when they did call that MPD.
But I was stupid. I didn’t tell anyone that I was sick. I hid it. I covered for my altars. And it eventually pretty much destroyed my life. That’s one of the reasons I’m doing this podcast. I want people to know that if they have something like this, they need to seek help. They need to tell people.
If you don’t tell someone, if you don’t get proper help, the consequences can be catastrophic and I don’t want other people to end up like I did.
I’m going to be interviewing people on this program who have DID.
I want the listeners to hear how these [00:02:00] people DID are living their daily lives. Just like anyone else. It’s a disorder, and it’s a serious disorder, but it’s one you can get under control.
I’m not a therapist, psychologist, psychiatrist, or any type of mental health professional.
I’m a former attorney and I worked as a healthcare public relations executive for a few years before going to law school.
I’ll sometimes refer to research or other sources when it comes to information about DID, but I’ll be giving my opinions and observations on those. Whatever I say is based on my own experiences and research, nothing more, nothing less.
On my website, the mangled, mind.com. I’ll put links to resources I use and other information. Other than that, everything is just my educated insight and opinion. As my friends will tell you, I am very opinionated.
Why do I call it the mangled mind? Because that’s how I view it. DID rips your brain into many pieces with each piece becoming a different person with his, her, or their own [00:03:00] identity.
One of my favorite movies of all time is the 1984 fantasy comedy called All of Me with Steve Martin as Roger Cobb and Lily Tomlin as Edwina Cutwater. Edwina is dying and a mystic tries to transfer her soul into the beautiful young woman, played a Victoria Tennant, who in real life became Steve Martin’s future ex-wife. Anyway, everything goes wrong.
Edwina’s consciousness ends up in Roger. What follows is an entertaining farce with tour de force performances by both Martin and Tomlin, who are just incredible in this movie. Although the movie itself was not about multiple personalities, it’s a great metaphor for how the disorder presents itself. One body contains more than one consciousness, and they’re often fighting each other for dominance.
Over the years Hollywood has given us a lot of iterations of characters who’ve had multiple personalities. We’ve had theatrical movies like Fight Club, Split, and, going way back to 1957, we had The Three Faces of Eve. That’s my favorite movie on the subject [00:04:00] because Joanne Woodward gives just an incredible performance. She won the best actress, Oscar for it. So it was pretty good. Last year Disney plus had a mini series called Moon Knight. It’s depiction of DID was accurate in the way it approached the amnesia part and having blackouts.
Probably the most famous production that Hollywood ever did about characters who have multiple personalities was a TV movie called Sybil. It starred Sally field and aired back in the fall of 1976. It introduced people to the mental disorder in a way that no other program ever had.
How do we get this way? Trauma, and it’s almost always when we’re children. There are some reported cases of adults getting DID for the first time based on adult trauma, but it’s very rare. Those of us with severe DID can usually point to some awful shit we went through as kids.
I know I can.
But there’s one thing we can’t do and that’s compare the severity of our trauma because it’s all relative. It depends on the individual and how [00:05:00] that person’s brain processes it.
A 2023 book by doctors Paroma Mitra and Ankit Jain mentions four factors identified by therapists that must be present for, DID to occur.
First, the child has to possess the ability to dissociate. I don’t know what that means. I’d love to speak with a researcher on exactly what gives the child that ability. Somehow though, I don’t think they’ll be able to answer it. I think they’ll say the child either.
Has it? Or the child doesn’t. Second, the child has to have gone through some overwhelming traumatic experiences that distort Reality.
Since we know that trauma is relative to the person, I’m sure it’s impossible to put a threshold on exactly how much trauma is required to trigger the disorder.
, the person creates alternate personalities or alters, and they have specific names and identities. I used to have several, but two of them dominated into adulthood. They were Mark and Wayne. Mark is the criminal. He pulls all kinds of crap from [00:06:00] shoplifting to embezzlement. Wayne. Well, Wayne is the whore.
Now don’t get me wrong. He wasn’t just some man slut who jumped from one boy to the next. He literally was a whore. He pimped himself out and earned me some extra money. He was into some real, crazy kinky shit, and I really can’t talk about a lot of it on air, but he would wake me up in the middle of it. It didn’t take me long to figure out what was going on. Talk about trauma.
I realize it’s pretty judgmental calling Wayne a whore, but the fact is he was.
Mark is a thief. He is an embezzler, he’s a burglar. He got me into lots of trouble. I know people with 10 or more alters. And they have specific names, ages, and backgrounds, and I don’t know how they do it.
I have a hard time keeping up with those two.
I can’t imagine having a whole troop of them running around in my head, trying to take over. Finally the fourth requirement is the lack of external stability for the child. I [00:07:00] guess if a child lives in a home with a strong support system, loving parents, the risk of getting DID would probably be lower.
I assume that it happens to children when they have no place to turn for help. I know I didn’t have that.
The bottom line is that our brains tried to protect us from the severe trauma by creating alters.
Those alters would take over our bodies and let the abuse happen to them. Unfortunately, it didn’t always work that way. More often than not, our alters were less like Superman and more like Boris and Natasha trying to catch Moose and Squirrel.
I think I just aged myself with that reference.
When I was eight years old, I started missing time. At least that’s when I first noticed it. I would lose hours, days. I didn’t know what was happening and I didn’t say anything to anybody about it because I didn’t know what they would do to me. As time passed, I kind of forgot about forgetting. I put it out of my mind. And then a couple of years later, I lost an entire year. The fifth grade never happened for me. To this day, I can’t [00:08:00] even tell you who my teacher was for that year. And as time passed again, I kind of forgot about it.
When I turned 16 and got a car, that’s when things started really getting fucked up for me.
It got worse when I went to college. It got worse when I graduated. And it got worse when I went to law school. It got worse when I started practicing law.
I lost jobs, friends, and, eventually, my freedom, all because I was too afraid as a 16 year old, or is it eight year old to tell someone what was going on so that I could get help. And I was too stupid as an adult to do anything about it too.
Some people know a little bit about my story, but nobody knows all of it. Starting next week, I’ll be interviewing those that I’ve run into with dissociative identity disorder. We’re going to talk about their lives and how they live it.
I’m gonna try to put a face on it and let people know that this can happen to anyone out there. No one is immune from this disorder. The common factor is trauma. I [00:09:00] hope you come back each week to listen to what’s going on here.
We’re going to have some pretty exciting shows. I think, especially knowing who’s coming up in the next few weeks. If you’re interested in being interviewed on this program, please go to my website, TheMangledMind.com. There’s a place to submit your application.
All you have to do is register for the website and registration is free.
Another thing.
I want my listeners to trust me. And I want the people I interview to trust me. Keeping that in mind, I promise three things.
First. If the person I’m interviewing doesn’t want themselves identified by their real name, then they can use an alias.
Second, if the person being interviewed wants their voice altered, I can do that as well.
And third, before the podcast airs, I will play it in its entirety for the person being interviewed. And they can make changes, or they can actually even kill the podcast at that point. I won’t run it. I’m not going to exploit anyone for the sake of this program.
My plan Is to release a new podcast every Friday, [00:10:00] where I’ll be interviewing someone and providing some of my wonderful insight that I’m sure will piss someone off.
You can write to me at stevenshelton@themangledmind.com or you can go to my website.
Until next week, stay safe and have good mental health.
