Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder

Multiple personality disorder is generally caused by a history of repetitive and serious, even to the point of life-threatening, trauma in childhood, generally before the age of nine. It’s possible that those who develop MPD have an inherited genetic predisposition for dissociation. Generally, it’s caused by extreme physical and sexual abuse, but it can also be caused by natural disasters, invasive medical procedures, war, kidnapping, and torture. Just about anything that can cause post traumatic stress disorder can also cause MPD.

Fortunately for the sufferers, it’s a treatable mental illness once it’s diagnosed. It is, however, one of the most often misdiagnosed illnesses, particularly in men; the typical victim spends an average seven years in the mental health system prior to being diagnosed, and many men wind up in the prison system and are never diagnosed at all. This is because there are so many symptoms in MPD that are similar to other personality disorders, and also because the typical sufferer of MPD will also have other disorders, such as post traumatic stress disorder.

Dissociative disorders such as MPD can be cured. Typically, psychotherapy, where a therapist uses various talking techniques to draw out traumatic memories, is the core of the treatment, but other therapies are used, such as medication, hypnotherapy, art therapy, and movement therapy. It is long-term, intensive, and painful to help a person through the remembering and integration of traumatic experiences. It is, however, one of the most successfully-treated mental illnesses.

Because MPD is often caused by repeated trauma and stress, it’s likely that naturally-produced chemicals related to stress such as norepinephrine, cortisol, opiates, dopamine, and serotonin were over-produced in the brain, which can cause them to behave as neurotoxins that kill neurons, particularly in the hippocampus. The degeneration of the hippocampus may contribute to the fragmentation of traumatic memories as well as dissociative amnesia.

There may be other causes of multiple personality disorder such as temporal lobe epilepsy or the severance of the corpus callosum (often done surgically to treat illnesses such as severe epilepsy). Organic causes of MPD are more difficult to treat, but can generally be controlled with drugs.

Drugs, however, are no replacement for therapy. Therapy helps a patient change his or her own thought patterns and create new pathways for memories to connect to one another. And therapy can help patients determine when is the right time to start integrating memories together, building a single strong personality out of the fragmented ones that make up the MPD sufferer.