The Personality Disorder Sybil s Story Of Commercial...

Imagine one day you wake up to find yourself in an unfamiliar place at early dawn; it would probably be a scary experience. That was Sybil’s reaction, a character in a novel, when she found herself in a restaurant in Philadelphia after she fainted in college. Confused, she returned home to find people referring to her as someone else. In this famous novel, Sybil was diagnosed with Dissociative identity disorder (D.I.D.). It is a mental disorder that falls under the dissociation spectrum, and was known previously as the multiple personality disorder. According to the American Psychiatric Association (2013), it is a severe condition of identity disruption characterized by two or more distinct personality states. D.I.D. is a rare disease that has higher prevalence in the teenagers and adults, about 0.1% to 1% in US, than in children and elderly. Sybil’s story is based on the true story of commercial artist Shirley Ardell Mason. This character lived with her doctor and her sixteen alter egos until she died from breast cancer in 1998 (Schreiber, 2016). As a prominent case of D.I.D., Shirley Mason’s story helps shed light on this disorder, but what are the causes, diagnosis, and treatment of such disorder. Causes Although the main cause behind dissociative identity disorder is complex, psychiatrist have reached a consensus on the theory that D.I.D. patients’ identities get fragmented, rather than proliferating out of nowhere. This fragmentation process usually occurs after going