5.1 Post summary / Table of contents

This is the 5th of a series of 8 blog posts, which I’m serializing weekly. (Or email or DM me if you want to read the whole thing right now.)

Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) (previously known as “Multiple Personality Disorder”) involves a person having multiple “alters” (alternate identities), with different preferences and (in some cases) different names. A DID diagnosis also requires some nonzero amount of “inter-identity amnesia”, where an alter cannot recall events that occurred when a different alter was active. For example, DSM-V talks about patients “coming to” on a beach with no recollection of how they got there.

Anyway, just like trance in the previous post, DID was one of those things that I unthinkingly assumed was vaguely fictional for most of my life. Maybe that's because my only exposure to it was in actual fiction. While the artistic [...]

---

Outline:

(00:08) 5.1 Post summary / Table of contents

(03:54) 5.2 Why is the suggestion of culture and psychologists a risk factor for DID?

(06:51) 5.3 Why is Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) a risk factor for DID?

(09:09) 5.3.1 …So the DID alters correspond to different emotional states?

(11:42) 5.4 Why is childhood trauma a risk factor for DID?

(14:34) 5.5 Amnesia

(19:04) 5.5.1 If everyday strong emotions are a bit like mild DID, do they come with mild amnesia??

(21:26) 5.6 Conclusion

The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

---

First published:
October 15th, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6bW5uJ325JxHYqMFr/intuitive-self-models-5-dissociative-identity-multiple

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

“[Intuitive self-models] 5. Dissociative Identity (Multiple Personality) Disorder” by Steven Byrnes

LessWrong (30+ Karma)