A 23-year-old girl from Georgia suffers from a rare case of dissociative identity disorder. Usually, with such a disorder, a person has two or three different personalities in one consciousness, while Lauren Stott has twelve of them, and all are completely different.
According to her doctors, Lauren was blamed for multiple multiple personality disorders for some serious trauma at school, presumably the girl was raped.
Lauren has a friend to whom she is engaged, and he admits that sometimes even he finds it difficult to cope with the different personalities living in his girlfriend.
The girl was officially diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder only in 2017, before that she was undergoing psychiatric treatment for a suicide attempt a year earlier.
According to Lauren, inside of her there is also a person named "Sylvia" who can throw a stupid childish tantrum at any moment, because she is only seven years old. Another of her personality is an intellectually developed devout Mormon, and another is called "Hope" and constantly suffers from the experiences of adolescence. It is Hope who is sure she was raped.
Within Lauren, there are also personalities that she describes as animals. The girl says that she communicates with her personalities according to her own scheme and it is very difficult for her to tell other people about them.
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Lauren now volunteers at an animal shelter. About her personalities, she says that she divides them all into groups of four in a row and the very first are "leaders", those who have the greatest influence on her.
Lauren says that she is uncomfortable when people are skeptical about her condition, and those who believe her often think that she is a violent psychopath.
“This is because in movies and TV shows, people with multiple personality disorder are always portrayed as killers and psychos. In fact, this is very rare. And when they tell me that I am lying, I ask them, “Why should I lie about this?”.
Dr. David Spiegel, associate professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, says Lauren and others like her are often confused with schizophrenia, but the diagnoses are completely different.
»People with schizophrenia have a distorted perception of the world based on hallucinations and delusions. People with dissociative disorders have many parts of their personality and they have problems interpreting their memories, a sense of identity and aspects of consciousness in general."
According to Spiegel, there are actually a lot of such people, and often this begins due to severe mental trauma in childhood. The division of a single whole into different personalities occurs due to the psychological mechanism of protecting oneself from similar injuries in the future.
As therapy, Lauren takes her prescribed medications, but she says her dog, Sergeant Tibbs, helps her the most.
The most famous person with multiple identity disorder in history was Billy Milligan (1955-2014). Split personality Milligan had 24 full-fledged personalities, of which 10 were the main ones.
In the late 1970s, Milligan was accused of rape and robbery, but he assured that he did not do this, but his other personalities did and he did not know about their deeds. In the end, he was fully acquitted, but sent to psychiatric treatment "until he recovers." Milligan was declared healthy in 1988 and was discharged from the hospital.
