The blog “Normal Novelists have Multiple Personality” is two years old: Why was it started and why is it read around the world by a smart few?

Growing up, after my cowboy and athlete phases, I wanted to be a novelist, possibly because we had a set of Charles Dickens. But my practical models for adulthood were my father and mother’s brother, who had been roommates at medical school. So in college, besides premedical courses, I took a combined major of psychology and philosophy. And after medical school, I specialized in psychiatry. I thought that psychology, philosophy, medicine, and psychiatry would help me to understand the human mind and condition, and, eventually, to write a great novel.

As a psychiatrist, my most eye-opening clinical experience has been multiple personality, which I didn’t diagnose until I had been in practice for twelve years. The reason for the long delay was that, like most psychiatrists, I had been taught almost nothing about it in medical school and psychiatric residency, and, in the typical case, the symptoms are camouflaged and hidden from both doctor and patient (as I explain elsewhere in this blog). Fortunately, it becomes clearly observable—without using drugs or hypnosis—once you learn about it, which I finally did.

During the years prior to my learning about multiple personality, I had occasionally read newspaper and magazine interviews of novelists. And when they spoke, as they often did, of hearing the voice of, and of interacting with, their characters—whom they described as having minds of their own—I had always thought that they were joking. But now that I had seen multiple personality and understood what it was, I realized that these novelists were describing multiple personality, the only difference being that it was a nonclinical form of it. To repeat: What novelists commonly describe about their interactions with their characters is, in itself, a sufficient proof of this blog’s thesis, that normal novelists have multiple personality.

So I decided to look more closely at a specific novelist. And since, when I was a boy, my family had had that set of Dickens, I naturally chose him. The result was the first post of this blog, “Dickens, Multiple Personality, and Writers” (June 2013), which was also the blog’s original title. But I did not decide to write this blog until I had the following experience.

For years, I had occasionally read books on writing. And now I was reading two nonfiction books, and also one novel, by a contemporary novelist. I was startled to find that one of the nonfiction books contained an essay written in the first person by an alternate personality, who spoke of the novelist as someone else. And then I found that the other nonfiction book contained comments by two alternate personalities on how they controlled different aspects of the novelist’s writing. And then I found that the novel contained a character who had obvious, but unacknowledged, multiple personality.

In an email exchange between me and the novelist, first the novelist pretended that the essay was a joke; then the novelist declined to comment on the passages I quoted from the other nonfiction book, passages that had clearly been written by alternate narrative personalities commenting on their own contribution to the writing process; and then the novelist said that the character in the novel—who had changes of personality associated with episodes of amnesia (without any medical condition or intoxication to explain the amnesia)—did not have multiple personality, but was just exhibiting, based on the novelist’s own life experience, “ordinary psychology.” (To the novelist, classic multiple personality was ordinary psychology.)

After all the above, I felt I had to do something. But what?

The reaction I had gotten to my Dickens essay from Dickens scholars was that they could not dispute my facts about Dickens, but since they had no experience with multiple personality, they could not be convinced about that. And the contemporary novelist had shown me that novelists would not be any more receptive to the issue than the literary scholars.

Should I publish something for people who did know about multiple personality? The problem is, most mental health professionals who do have clinical experience with multiple personality disorder (aka dissociative identity disorder) have never heard of, and are not interested in, normal multiple personality, the subject of this blog. And they have never read novels or studied novelists with multiple personality in mind.

Since there was hardly any audience for my thesis in either the literary world or in psychiatry, I decided that it would be futile to pursue traditional publication. But why, then, write a blog?

There are several advantages to a blog. First, you waste no time on getting it published. You sign up with a host like Google Blogger and it costs nothing (except if you choose to advertise, which I do, as noted below). Second, a realistic expectation as to how many people would buy a book by an unknown author on this subject is a few thousand, if you are lucky. And this blog has been read by that many people, and counting. Third, a traditional book or ebook would, probably, be soon forgotten. But since a blog is ongoing, when the time eventually comes that there is an audience for my thesis—possibly as a result of the blog’s persistence—the blog will be there to take advantage of that opportunity. Fourth, the blog is a format that suits me.

As I mentioned, I do advertise this blog. Initially, I advertised in literary publications, but that was a waste of money. I have also tried direct communication. But I found that most literary scholars and novelists are just not interested in what I have to say. So I advertise this blog with Google Ads, which is why the blog has been visited from over fifty countries around the world.

My blog is hosted by Google Blogger, and my only connection with social media is Google Plus. Every time I make a new post, a link to it appears on my computer screen if I Google the subject matter mentioned in the post’s title. I hope I am correct in assuming that the same link to my blog appears on the screens of others with Google Plus if they happen to be searching that subject using Google. I imagine that I could get links to my blog on more screens if I were involved with more social media, but I’m not.

The blog has been visited more than thirty thousand times, but I’ve read that 90% of visits to most blogs are by people who look for a few seconds and leave. Moreover, the posts almost never get any comments. So I infer that relatively few people read the blog regularly and take it seriously. I think the reason is that most literary people don’t relate to the psychiatry, and most psychiatric people who treat multiple personality don’t relate to the blog’s thesis that many normal people have multiple personality. In short, my blog has a very smart, but very small, worldwide audience.

However, as mentioned in the last post, it took five years for people to notice the Wright brothers, and this blog is only two years old.