This project was wildly interesting to me, and something that I really looked forward to working on. Although a very small population of people have Dissociative Identity Disorder, I found it was something that I wanted to explore in depth, something that I wanted to know more about and something I wanted to try to understand. As a person who lives with mental illness, I am always looking to learn about new and different mental illnesses, and always interested to hear about how disability is represented in the media, particularly through Hollywood movies. 

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As I decided to make this into a research project, I was nervous for what I might find, and I was nervous to see if I could actually make any sort of conclusion or discovery. 

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I looked at two movies that were based on true stories, and two movies that were fictional accounts of the disorder. I hoped that this would show two vastly different representations of DID. In some ways it did, and in some ways, it did not. 

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The movies that were based on true accounts, The Three Faces of Eve, and Sybil, were far more tame than the other two films. They followed the mental health journeys of two women trying to find and understand their disorders - neither of the women are criminals, they are just misunderstood and they need help to get back on the right track mentally. They find help in therapy and each of them discovers things about themselves and their traumatizing histories. They are both seen as delusional in their mental health journeys at the beginning. Particularly in the case of Sybil, where the male doctors literally say that she is just hysteric because she is on her period, or faking it because she wants attention. 

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This little tidbit about women with mental illness being seen as "hysteric," because they are dealing with living with mental disabilities was shocking to me. But I guess it was a different time back then, when we were still in the early stages of understanding what DID even was. 

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One anecdote from Sybil that I thought was a really great way to explain DID was through the use of a Russian nesting doll. The Russian nesting doll is a representation of how although the personalities can be different in age, shape, and size, they all fit together within the one main body, or main brain, and they work together to become whole. I really liked this description, and that is why I decided to use Russian nesting dolls throughout my blog. 

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Russian Nesting Doll Photos Retrieved from Charish.

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To continue, I found it interesting that the women were perceived as relatively non-violent in their disorder, whereas the men in Identity and Split were both extremely violent murderers fighting at all odds to kill off either pieces of themselves, or to kill off others for the benefit of ones self. 

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Piggybacking off of that, both of the movies that were not based on actual accounts had the weirdest storylines - neither of these stories pertain to the actual treatment of DID. For example, in Identity, Malcom is given an "experimental drug" that makes all of his identities go inside his brain so they call all fight to the death until one remains victorious. There are no experimental drugs that offer this experience. People with DID could be given anxiety medication or antidepressants to try to cope with the disorder, but there are no medications on the market that actually provide real relief from the symptoms, let alone lets your personalities duke it out in your mind. This was the first example of unrealistic portrayals of DID. 

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To continue, Split was even more off than Identity. Split seems to offer a real depiction of the Psychotherapy that it takes to combat DID - but in the end, it didn't even matter. Kevin and his personalities were actually just some weird way to prepare to create a superhero (villain?) who has immediate super strength, can climb on walls, is bulletproof, and kidnaps and kills young girls to in order to grow stronger. 

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This is obviously completely inaccurate, and I was shocked when I watched it for the first time. It's weird to see how movies can take one aspect and roll with the mystery and intrigue behind it all until the stories don't even line up anymore. That is what I found when I watched this movie. 

 

As I went into this research project, I looked to answer two questions:

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