Iris Havengard Personality discussion

[GrayShadows]

I would go even farther with a split mind or schizophrenia. As it is understood to modern psychology, the condition is thought to sometimes result when a child copes with abuse by convincing themselves that it's happening to someone else.

Sorry, are you talking about schizophrenia here, or about being a multiple system (with or without dissociative identity disorder*)? Schizophrenia is etymologically linked to 'split mind' (from Greek, IIRC), but it actually refers to a different set of symptoms and impairments (hallucinations, delusions, disorganized speech and thinking); disordered multiple systems are referred to having dissociative identity disorder, which was formerly multiple personality disorder. The 'split' in 'split mind' refers to the fractured mental processes, not a division of personalities.

Either one could be interesting, but schizophrenia would make it difficult to incorporate her into the team since she... wouldn't be terribly functional, and developing her into a multiple system would mean creating /two/ (or more) fully-fledged personalities for her when we already have to agree on one. This is a pretty good discussion of DID, although it is quite long, almost an hour and a half; it's essentially a university guest lecture. It's not a perfect description of every multiple system's experiences, but then no one person's experiences will map exactly onto another's.



*The clinical definition for 'disorder' includes as a requirement being impaired in daily life; if a multiple system (someone with multiple personalities/alters) is perfectly functional, then they wouldn't be considered disordered and a DID diagnosis would be inaccurate. I have a friend who's a cooperative multiple system and even his doctor agrees that he's not disordered.