Poy

Warning: I don’t have DID, though I know someone who does so take my words with a grain of salt I liked all of the alters, they felt vibrant and like actual people. I could get past the screaming and all that. Though they had over exaggerated his alters a little. The attitude towards the system was not nice and made me uncomfortable a lot throughout the show. Especially when they got terms of DID wrong (ex: co-conscious [or co-con] is when 1 alter is fronting but another alter is there, aware of what is happening and sometimes leading to a switch between who is fronting. It doesn’t mean that one alter is going to take complete control of the body forever). The physiatrists were also not very understanding in the fact that yelling or being afraid of someone who has trauma was not the best idea to get them to like you. Not a good portrayal of DID, in the way they also called it Multiple personally disorder as if that was the real name of the disorder. The way they also treated his alters as burdens or just weird mental states was also not great. Though in theory alters can merge to become one person, it’s almost impossible for it to actually fully happen. The cause of DID is trauma in childhood that results in parts of your brain not combining to create your personality and forming walls to cope with said trauma. Therefore those separated parts form their own personality separate from the ‘original’ person. Instead of having ‘more’ personalities, you have factions of a unformed one that fully form separate. Like lizards or starfish, if you cut part of their body off and both parts repair, it’s still the same animal, just 2 separate ones now. Treating alters as if they are just a broken off limb that needs to be put back onto the body instead of their own person can be really hurtful mentally. When they were treating his alters as a problem to be fixed, it was extremely rude. Telling someone they don’t exist and are just a result of that person coping and will leave soon is very damaging. I know this is a show from 2015 but please consider doing some research into how DID works instead of taking this shows word for it. It’s not only ‘romanticizing’ DID, it’s making it seem just as a mental illness that will just ‘go away one day’ than an actual psychological disorder.