World Health Organization's ICD-11 may add “Partial Dissociative Identity Disorder” to help clinicians who don’t know multiple personality’s typical presentation

Many clinicians think they never see multiple personality. The reason is that they don’t know what it looks like. If they had read the modern psychiatric literature, they would know the clinical cliché that typical multiple personality is characterized by “hiddenness.”

For example, the very concept of the “host personality” (the regular, social personality) implies that alternate personalities usually hide, and that, when they do come out, usually do so incognito.

Alternate personalities typically become overt only in crises, or when the person is alone, or in special circumstances, such as in therapy for multiple personality, after diagnosis has blown their cover.

To help and appease uninitiated clinicians, it has been proposed that the next edition, ICD-11, add “Partial Dissociative Identity Disorder” (1). 

1. World Health Organization. “Partial Dissociative Identity Disorder.” http://pre.gcp.network/en/icd-11-guidelines/categories/disorder/partial-dissociative-identity-disorder