[Freddie deBoer] "Multiple Personality Disorder" Probably Doesn't Exist, And There Certainly Hasn't Been an Explosion of It Among the Youth: TikTok culture can be incredibly toxic, but those on the left refuse to ever condemn it for fear of echoing conservatives

Their disorders don’t make much sense, for the record. For example, it’s very popular on DID TikTok to do an “alter roll call” or similar, where you show off your various personalities, usually with an outfit change between each one to better show off the personality difference. But in order to even conceive of making such a video, you’d have to think that you could reliably control when you would switch to a given personality! In the classic conception of dissociative identity disorder, those who suffer from it are not in control of when they switch, and in fact are often not even aware that they have done so. It would be completely impossible to plan out a video where you could reliably be in the right personalities at the right time, in sequence, and also expect them to be amenable to putting on an outfit and participating in a video. It’s bullshit, transparent bullshit. You might also wonder how the next alter knows to participate in a TikTok video, given that traditionally one alter is not supposed to know what the next is doing. But don’t worry, the TikTokers have a word for it - it’s called “co-con,” co-conscious, and it helpfully explains away a very basic piece of evidence that all of this is bogus. They always have these little outs, these very convenient explanations for inconvenient discrepancies between their disorders and the facts of their lives.

You might very well ask how it could possibly be the case that a notoriously controversial and historically extremely rare disorder would suddenly bloom into epidemic proportions among teenagers with smartphones and a burning need to differentiate themselves. How could that happen? The standard line on these things is that expanding public consciousness about such illnesses reduces stigma and empowers more people to get diagnosed with conditions they already had. But with dissociative identity disorder, I can only ask… really? One of the rarest mental illnesses in the medical literature has had thousands of people walking around undiagnosed, despite the fact that it’s perhaps the single hardest psychiatric condition to hide? It’s one thing to say that there’s tons of, say, autistic people walking around who are undiagnosed because of stigma around the diagnosis. It’s another to say that thousands of people’s conditions have gone unnoticed when they experience the world as a number of distinct and incompatible personalities which they switch between in jarring and disorienting moments.

None of this is healthy. None of it will result in better treatment or results for those who have legitimate psychiatric disorders. Ideas core to the toxic mental health ideology that kids are absorbing on TikTok include

• That intense childhood trauma is universal or near-universal, despite the fact that it simply isn’t, and thank god
• That trauma is somehow ennobling, a maker of meaning, a creator of identity, a way to be unique and special, rather than something terrible we should do everything we can to prevent
• Correspondingly, that to be mentally healthy is undesirable, when it’s a condition we should aspire to secure for everyone
• That mental illness is an identity, the most important and central element of someone’s self, rather than an unfortunate detail, and that the right way to have a mental illness is to revel in it, celebrate it, fixate on it completely, act as though there’s nothing else interesting or meaningful about you than your mental illness
• That any critical thinking or questioning of their rhetoric about mental illness is inherently a matter of “stigma” and thus illegitimate, and that the job of doctors and therapists is always to affirm their self-diagnoses, not to act as independent and dispassionate agents
• That anything they feel is valid, that their emotions are a perfect guide to their reality, and that anything that contradicts their intuitions or their desires is by definition the hand of oppression.

And the core point here is that the people who are being hurt by this are these kids themselves. Sucking up scarce mental health resources with fictitious conditions is irresponsible, yes, and pretending to be sick for clout is untoward. But setting that aside, self-diagnosis is dangerous. Playacting a serious mental illness is harmful to your actual mental health. Fixating on the most broken part of yourself is contrary to best medical practices and to living a fulfilled life. Defining yourself by dysfunction is a great way to stay dysfunctional. And everything about mental illness that seems cool and deep and intense when you’re 18 becomes sad and pathetic and self-destructive and ugly by the time you’re 40. Take it from me. These kids are hurting themselves. I don’t want to ridicule them. I’m not even angry at them. I’m angry at their adult enablers. That includes the vast edifice of woowoo self-help bullshit Instagram self-actualization yoga winemom feel-good consumerist tell-me-I’m-special psychiatric medicine, and a media that loves the prurient thrills of multiple personalities and never saw a vulnerability that it couldn’t exploit.

Most of these young people will probably just move on as they get older, realizing that keeping up this pretense is exhausting and pointless, and go on to live (I hope) normal healthy lives. But some of them are no doubt using these popular and trendy diagnoses as a way to avoid what’s really wrong with them, far more prosaic and thus unsexy personal problems, whether mental illnesses or not. And all of this, the enabling and the humoring and the patronizing, will really hurt them in the long run. Adults who play into it should be ashamed.