Depression Talk

When you are diagnosed with any type of depression, you have a lot of questions and fears. One of these questions is if you have a split personality. If you have bipolar disorder, you can be excused for wondering if you have spilt personailty or multiple personality. If you have one kind of head problem, you could have another, right?

Incredibly Rare

Someone who actually has split personalities or multiple personality disorder is a very rare person, indeed. With a true split personailty disorder, you blank out when your other personalities take over. None of the other personalities are conscious of the other personalities. It’s also known as dissociative identity disorder (DID).

Then again, the very existence of DID or multiple personality disorder is the subject of much controversy. We can’t get in the heads of the patients. We can only assume that what they tell their doctors is the truth. There is also controversy over how many people are walking around with split personalities and whether it’s over diagnosed. And if it can be proved that there are more than one personalities living in a body, can you claim your other personalities as dependents on your income tax?

Other facts include:

• Women get DID more than men
• There aren’t any reliable statistics on how many people in the world or in America have DID
• Childhood trauma is usually considered the cause

One thing is clear — those suspected of having DID also suffer from depression. However, this doesn’t mean that everyone with depression also had DID.

Also, leading psychologists think a diagnosis should be based on a minimum of six years of showing symptoms and not just one visit to atherapist.

Bipolar Disorder

It can seem that people with bipolar disorder are indeed two people in one body. The one is hyper and super-positive and feels great while the other is, well, more human. But a person with bipolar disorder still has a sense of self during both highs and lows and everywhere in between. There may be memory laspes, but they are the memory lapses that we all have — especailly if we have missed a lot of sleep or have been self-medicating with alcohol or recreational drugs.

So, if you have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder or another type of depression, the odds are really good that you do not have split personalities.