Why Members of the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD)—Multiple Personality Experts—Avoid This Blog

The ISSTD is the principal organization for mental health professionals who treat and study dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality disorder). Its members do not read this blog, because this blog is about normal multiple personality, which is not a psychiatric disorder. Dissociative identity disorder is in the psychiatric diagnostic manual (DSM-5); normal multiple personality is not. So this blog is beyond their scope.

If members of the ISSTD ever did see this blog, I think they would take a dim view of it. For any talk of normal multiple personality would remind them of one of the favorite attacks of skeptics. Skeptics like to derisively say that, in a sense, everyone has multiple personality: the psychiatric disorder is just a foolish, gullible, mistaken reification of normal psychology. And ISSTD members would not want to admit that anything the skeptics say is even half right.

Now, the skeptics are wrong about multiple personality disorder. This disorder is actually one of the oldest, most clearly defined, best proven disorders in the diagnostic manual. And it is certainly not true that everyone has multiple personality. Nevertheless, it is true that a substantial minority of the general public does have what I call normal multiple personality: a version of multiple personality that 1. is too common to call an illness, 2. does not cause significant distress or dysfunction, and 3. may be an asset (e.g., in writing novels).

So while most professors of literature avoid this blog—they think it’s preposterous and, anyway, beyond their expertise—most of those mental health professionals who do have expertise with multiple personality disorder avoid this blog, too. They would fear that it could inadvertently support the skeptics. And besides, most multiple personality experts have never studied literature in this regard, and so they, like the literature professors, would see this interdisciplinary blog as going beyond their scope.

Which leaves me with a very select readership.

I wouldn’t want to exaggerate how select. You are not alone. This blog is read by people from more than thirty countries. But in absolute numbers of serious readers? How many people in this whole world are as open-minded and perceptive as you?