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Hey aznrawsum,
That’s a really interesting question but is kind of difficult to explain. The condition you’re referring to is known as multiple personalities or dissociative identity disorder (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_identity_disorder)
There are some cases of people with multiple personalities- one of the most studied was a woman known as Sybil who in the 1950s was a university student who had a high IQ and was very intelligent. She started seeking psychiatric therapy and it was slowly revealed during her therapy that she had been abused by her schizophrenic mother. Under hypnosis, there were 16 personalities inhabiting her own mind that would be revealed as protectors, scared children, worries grandmothers, etc. Sybil’s story was turned into a best-selling book but there is still a lot of controversy surrounding the degree of split personalities. The story of Sybil is usually studied in Year 11 Psychology but there have been many other accounts of people suffering from the same condition.
Hope this answers your question!
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Great answer, Mel!
My star sign is Gemini and people often say that we have two personalities, but I’m not so sure! Sometimes I’m just hungrier and grumpier than others! 🙂
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Multiple identity/personality disorders are real. I don’t know how far research into how and why this happens has come so far, but i know that there are scientists and psychiatrists working on it!
As to how many, I’m not sure. Whether you could split yourself (like Voldemort in harry potter!), I’ll say why would you. You would be fighting each of the other personalities to come and interact with the world. I have no idea how that would be like, but I think it’d suck!
Hope that makes sense 🙂
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In the movie, Me, Myself and Irene, Jim Carey plays a character with two personalities, Hank and Charlie. He is told that his split personality is part of the diagnosis of his condition of schizophrenia. A lot of people still believe that people with schizophrenia have a split personality. But this is simply not true.
Perhaps this myth that “split personality” is part of schizophrenia may have arisen because the word “schizophrenia” comes from Greek words meaning “split mind”. But the “split” is not referring to “split personality”, but rather to the fact that the person is “split from reality”.
Dissociative identity disorder is controversial psychiatric disorder that involves two or more personality states that exist within a person at the same time. The person is usually not aware of their different personalities and what they get up to. The other personalities may have different body language, voice, tone, even gender and memories. The person may switch to another personality state when under stress. Most psychiatrists believe that dissociative disorder can be caused by trauma in childhood. They think it’s a protection mechanism where a child may avoid remembering something that happened to them by dissociating into a different person.
Unlike schizophrenia, which effects 1 in 100 people, this condition is very rare.
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All that I know about split personalities, I learned from “The United States of Tara”. So I don’t think I had better offer any explanations. 🙂
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