Beyond Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde Essay

Beyond Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: A Look into Real Cases of Dissociative Identity Disorder
Katelyn Hong
Jefferson University Beyond Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: A Look into Real Cases of Dissociative Identity Disorder
People with mental illnesses have often been stigmatized in society, and those with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) are no exception. A negative social stigma has developed toward DID, which is colloquially referred to as split or multiple personality disorder (MPD). This is partially due to how DID patients are depicted in popular media. Perhaps in your English professor made you read the 1886 gothic novella, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson, in which a good doctor becomes evil when

The boy was physically abused and neglected growing up, and had recurrent "hysteric" attacks (Faure, 1997). When he was 17 years old and bitten by a snake, he had an attack which resulted in an inability to use his legs for nearly a year. Once he regained the ability after a 50-hour attack, he did not remember the physicians who had treated him in the asylum for the last month, nor any of his fellow patients. His behavior, morals, and appetite were also different. Following additional attacks, the subsequent year, his character fluctuated from reckless and dangerous to relaxed and temperate. In 1884, he had an attack that left him calm but incapable of using his legs, and another attack that returned his ability to walk yet left him confrontational and prone to stealing, like when he was a child. Vivet also suffered from amnesia during the intervals spanning episodes. By 1888, ten personality alters were recorded, each with distinctive personality, memory, and somatic symptoms (Faure, 1997). Interestingly, the initial reports by Vivet's doctors only recognized two of his several discovered alters during his first hospitalized, possibly in an effort to fit Vivet's case into the mold of double personality disorder, as that disorder was more commonly known and accepted at the