Opioid Dissociation: Why a Person With Multiple Personality Would Abuse Morphine

Multiple personality is a way to cope with childhood trauma, which can have lifelong effects. However, it is not a perfect solution, hence some people do not just have normal multiple personality, but have multiple personality disorder.

Multiple personality disorder is known in the psychiatric diagnostic manual, DSM-5, as dissociative identity disorder, and is classified as a dissociative disorder. Dissociation, in this context, means the use of psychological dividedness of the self to cope with posttraumatic anxiety.

Multiple personality is psychological dissociation. Opioid drugs, like morphine, tend to create chemical dissociation. The drugs don’t create multiple personality, but they do tend to distance the person from their posttraumatic anxieties and emotional pain by chemical amnesia, chemical emotional numbing, and a serene feeling (1).

Thus, some people with the aftereffects of childhood trauma cope by having multiple personality, some cope by abusing opioids, and some do both.

1. Eli Somer. “Opioid Use Disorder and Dissociation.” In Dell PF, O’Neil JA (Eds.), Dissociation and the Dissociative Disorders: DSM-5 and Beyond. New York, Routledge, 2009.