Skepticism by Some Psychiatrists about the Prevalence of Multiple Personality is Based on Their Not Asking Relevant Questions in Interviews

You, dear reader, may have an agnostic opinion about multiple personality, because you have seen books by psychiatrists and others on both sides. And you have never been told the cause of the skepticism. The cause is that the relevant kind of interview question discussed below is not taught in most psychiatric training programs. And some psychiatrists, including some eminent ones, have never learned it and never used it to screen their patients for multiple personality.

The minimum essential question that a psychiatrist or psychologist must ask in order to know whether or not the people they interview have multiple personality is: Have you ever had memory gaps?

Other versions of the same question: When you are not intoxicated, do you ever lose time? Do things ever happen that nobody else could have done, but you don’t remember doing it? Do people ever refer to things that they assume you remember—things that you or they allegedly said or did—but you don’t remember it. Have you ever found anything among your belongings that you couldn’t account for? Have you ever found yourself somewhere, but didn’t know how you got there? Are there things or events that you know about, and should remember, but you really don’t?

A person who does not have multiple personality will not understand such questions. A person who has had such experiences deserves further evaluation. A formal diagnosis of multiple personality is not made unless and until the psychiatrist actually speaks to an alternate personality, which is beyond the scope of this post.

Suffice it to say that 99% of the time the interviewer will not need hypnosis or drugs; there will be no context—legal or otherwise—in which malingering would make sense; and the interviewee will prefer to have almost any other diagnosis.

Either a psychiatrist screens all his patients for multiple personality by asking one simple type of question—“Have you ever had memory gaps?—or a psychiatrist’s skepticism about multiple personality is based on don’t ask, don’t tell.