BASIC CONCEPTS

— When novelists claim they do not invent it, but hear voices and find stories in their head, they are neither joking nor crazy.

— When characters, narrators, or muses have minds of their own and occasionally take over, they are alternate personalities.

— Alternate personalities and memory gaps, but no significant distress or dysfunction, is a normal version of multiple personality.

— normal Multiple Personality Trait (MPT) (core of Multiple Identity Literary Theory), not clinical Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)

— The normal version of multiple personality is an asset in fiction writing when some alternate personalities are storytellers.

— Multiple personality originates when imaginative children with normal brains have unassuaged trauma as victim or witness.

— Psychiatrists, whose standard mental status exam fails to ask about memory gaps, think they never see multiple personality.

— They need the clue of memory gaps, because alternate personalities don’t acknowledge their presence until their cover is blown.

— In novels, most multiple personality, per se, is unnoticed, unintentional, and reflects the author’s view of ordinary psychology.

— Multiple personality means one person who has more than one identity and memory bank, not psychosis or possession.

— Euphemisms for alternate personalities include parts, pseudonyms, alter egos, doubles, double consciousness, voice or voices.

— Multiple personality trait: 90% of fiction writers; possibly 30% of public.

— Each time you visit, search "name index" or "subject index," choose another name or subject, and search it.

— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

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Friday, April 30, 2021

Multiple Personality Misdiagnosed as Mental Retardation for 35 Years: A Case Report


ABSTRACT A woman was diagnosed as mentally retarded when she was five years of age and spent the next 35 years so classified. She also was considered schizophrenic. Incongruities in her clinical presentation ultimately led to the suspicion that she suffered multiple personality disorder. It was found that she had retreated into an adaptation consistent with the superficial manifest appearance of mental retardation, and that the intrusion of her dissociative psychopathology was mistaken for schizophrenia. Correctly diagnosed and treated, she has made noteworthy gains. Selected issues relevant to the misdiagnosis of MPD are discussed. 


Gail Atlas, A.C.S.W. Catherine G. Fine, Ph.D. Richard P. Kluft, M.D. Multiple Personality Disorder Misdiagnosed as Mental Retardation: A Case Report. DISSOCIATION 1:1, March 1988. https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/1335/Diss_1_1_10_OCR_rev.pdf?sequence=5

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