Drugs, Writers, Multiple Personality, and the Balance of Power

In my Post #2 on Dostoevsky’s The Double, I said that the Double triumphed over Golyadkin by getting him medicated and put away.

In my first post (June 2013 on Dickens), there was an anecdote near the end about Sir Walter Scott in which medication played a pivotal role.

Let me tell you how I learned that medication may affect the balance of power between personalities in multiple personality.

Many years ago, I was treating “Ann” with medication. She was happy with the results. So she had monthly appointments for medication renewal. Occasionally, she would mention that she had misplaced her medicine for part of the month, and that she had been worse without it, which only reinforced her satisfaction with the medication and her wish to have it continued.

But one month, as soon as she entered my office, she was IRATE. She HATED the medicine and DEMANDED that it be STOPPED! I tried to remind her that she had always praised the medicine, but I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. She HATED the medicine and DEMANDED that it be STOPPED! And she went on like that. There was no stopping her.

It occurred to me that she was being inconsistent. Acting out-of-character. So I asked her, “Who are you?” (Not who she was to speak to me like that, but what was her identity.) She immediately became quiet and looked at me like I had just caught her with her hand in the cookie jar.

It turned out that she was “Betty” and that, over the years, she and “Ann” had been in a continual battle as to who would be “out” and in control. But whenever “Ann” took the medicine, it somehow shifted the balance of power in her favor and kept “Betty” from coming out. So “Betty” would hide the medicine to keep “Ann” from taking it.

(In case you’re wondering, this really happened. I’m not making it up. Except for the names.)

There is no drug or medicine that cures a person of multiple personality. But a drug or medicine may have different effects on different personalities, and thereby, temporarily, affect the balance of power.