Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), also known as multiple personality disorder, is where a person develops one or more personalities that function with or without awareness within an individual. When a person has this mental illness, the symptoms involve breakdowns of memory that can interfere with a person’s functioning skills. As a result, the person may experience amnesia when their alternate personality comes to light or takes control of the person’s behavior. Amnesia is the inability to recall old memories (retrograde amnesia) or lay down new memories (anterograde amnesia) which could be caused from traumatic experiences or mental disorders. This topic took presented a certain interest due to how the brain can compensate for the result …show more content…
With DID patients, they will switch identities whenever they feel stress or even a situation that is best handled by another identity. According to Kristina Randle, who has a Ph.D. in psychology and a licensed psychotherapist, one of her patients said to her, “For instance, when I feel threatened or insulted a stronger person will stand in…The most I can say I’ve experienced is doing something and it feels like 15 minutes have passed but when I look at the clock 3 hours have gone by. This does happen a lot. I also sometimes forget where I put something and when I find it I don’t remember moving it.” (Randle 2011) This statement alone can show the amnesia present in just one DID patient where she cannot remember where she put things when in another identity. These studies demonstrate that amnesia is a prevalent symptom of this mental disease and can react in different ways. Amnesia can be in the form of memory loss where one identity does not remember information from a previous identity or an identity recollecting data which is passed on using inter-identity amnesia. As a result, Dissociative Identity Disorder does create an impact on an individual’s memory skills which can affect the brain’s capacity to remember or forget information upon switching to an alternate