How to screen for multiple personality, a condition that tries to remain hidden and avoid detection: an introduction for new visitors to the blog

Multiple personality, when seen after diagnosis, or if the person is in a crisis, may be quite obvious. Each alternate personality may answer to its name and be easily recognizable. But that is true only after diagnosis or in a crisis. Otherwise, people with multiple personality look like everyone else.

And even after diagnosis, if a therapist substituting for the regular therapist, who is on vacation, chooses to ignore previously acknowledged alternate personalities, the latter will be happy to disappear from view; that is, to resume their hidden, incognito lifestyle, which had always been the way they preferred to live anyway, since childhood.

In everyday life, you will usually not know that a person has multiple personality, because you usually encounter the same personality each time you meet the person: either their regular, “host personality” (which is usually the personality who is least aware of the others) or the particular alternate personality that is always out under the specific circumstance that you always meet them; e.g., at work, the work personality is always the one you meet (and it will always answer to the person’s regular name and remain incognito).

And even if you do encounter more than one of the person’s personalities, and even if this is reflected in puzzling changes of the person’s behavior, you are likely to presume that such changes are due to changing moods, not switching personalities.

The alternate personalities themselves usually don’t think of themselves as alternate personalities. They think of themselves as being other people (or as being spirits or as being reincarnated ancestors or as being whatever else is consistent with the person’s culture).

The most practical way to screen for multiple personality is to routinely ask people if they have memory gaps, which a host personality is likely to have for the periods of time that alternate personalities were in control.

You have to ask about memory gaps. The person will not volunteer this information, because the host personality views having memory gaps as simply the way their life has been since childhood. They assume that other people have them, too. It is not something they are coming to you for or are complaining about. 

Memory gap screening questions might include:

— Have you ever had memory gaps?

— Have you ever lost time?

— Have you ever found yourself somewhere, but not recalled how you got there?

— Have things ever happened that nobody else could have done, but you didn’t recall doing them?

— Have you ever had less memory for things (weddings, job interviews, conversations, shopping, sex, etc.) than other people do?

— If you have had memory gaps, but attributed them to drinking or drugs, have you ever had any memory gaps, even small ones, when you had not had alcohol or drugs, or, at least, not had enough to account for blackouts?

— To see more screening questions, search “checklists.”

The alternate personalities are usually discovered and interviewed in the course of finding out what happened during the memory gaps. And once their presence is inferred from memory gaps, and their character is inferred from what is known to have happened during those periods of time, then the alternate personalities may consider their cover blown, and then come forward and speak up (in interviews for which the host personality may later have a new memory gap). For further discussion, search “diagnosis,” “mental status,” and “diagnostic criteria.”

Screening for multiple personality—by asking about memory gaps or using checklists or administering formal research interviews—will not always detect it, because persons with multiple personality are often quite bright, realize what you are driving at, and don’t want you to know about it.

Indeed, it is possible to make videos of interviews with alternate personalities (who acknowledge seeing themselves as different people with different ages and names, etc.) and later show the videos to the host personality, who will still deny having multiple personality. Seeing is not believing: remembering is believing, and they don’t remember it.

Moreover, it is common for persons who have previously acknowledged alternate personalities to recant, and say they were lying or had just said what their therapist wanted to hear. But who is doing the recantation, and to whom? It may be the host personality (not the alternate personalities), who, due to memory gaps, had never believed in the multiple personality in the first place. And the recantation may be telling a skeptic what the skeptic passionately wants to hear.

You have to consider all the evidence and circumstances, including the memory gaps and what took place during the memory gaps, for which there may be corroboration. Most people diagnosed as having multiple personality are not involved in court cases, are not blaming other people, and have no reason to lie, especially since multiple personality is the craziest thing they can think of—no matter how much you reassure them it is not a psychosis—and most people don’t want to have it.