In the movie, “Split”, Kevin is a man who abducts three teenage girls who later come to realize Kevin is one of his 23 personalities. He suffers from a psychological disorder which is known as dissociative identity disorder. He has 23 different personalities all ranging from different genders to different ages. They all have different roles that they play. Starting with Kevin being the original personality to Barry who is the lead personality and spends most of his time in control. To a nine-year-old Hedwig who is in love with Kanye West to Jade a teenage girl with diabetes. He has many more that he switches out of but those are some of the main ones.
Dissociative identity disorder is a condition in which two or more distinct identities or personality states are present and alternately take control of an individual. People often describe the experience of possession. The person can experience memory loss which could be explained by ordinary forgetfulness. Dissociative identity disorder was known as Multiple personality disorder until 1994 when they decided to change the name for a better understanding of the condition. The disorder had become very controversial. Some people believe that the patients are easily hypnotized, their symptoms usually have come after therapists suggestions. But there have been brain imaging studies that have shown identity transitions in some patients. The disorder reflects the failure of being able to hold the aspects of memory, consciousness, and identity into a single multidimensional self. The primary dimension is the one that carries the individuals given name and guilty and depressed. When in control each personality alters, or state may be experienced as a distinct history, identity, and self-image.The characteristics of the alter all change, from name, age, gender, knowledge, vocabulary, and mood. The many identities may deny the knowledge of one of the others.
Many people with Dissociative identity disorder have grown up in an abusive family environment, where hiding is how they live there life. DID is a way the patient disconnects from avoidance of both the trauma and the dissociative parts of their personalities. When they switch they are totally unaware or conscious of themselves acting or talking in a different way than usual. They can feel that they are just watching what is happening from a distance as if it is not really them. Switching to another identity can be very obvious, it can be the dramatic changes of voice, posture, body, use of language, level of eye contact, and name.
The person with dissociative identity disorder, may not be aware that it is happening at all. They may just have a sense of losing time or incoherence about who they are and what they have been doing. They may pick up the conversation at the exact point at which they left it several minutes previously, before they switched, with only a vague sense of ‘missing’ something. They may appear to have fazed out temporarily and put it down to tiredness or not concentrating, or they may appear disoriented and confused. For many people with DID, switching unintentionally like this in front of other people makes them shameful and they will try to hide it as best as they can.
The movie did a pretty good job of showing how the disorder plays out, but it does give a few false representations. The movie shows how Kevin being the main person can alter his different identities in a matter of seconds. He is Berry one second and next, he is Hedwig. It shows how when his identity switches his actions, age, and voice all change as well. After watching the movie there are many misrepresentations of the disorder that can lead people to think that patients with this disorder will be like. For example, it will lead people to think everyone who had DID is dangerous because in the movie Kevin which is the main character starts off by kidnapping three girls. Some may believe that people who have DID will do some sort of crazy things like that. Also in the movie he becomes bulletproof which is obviously not true, he was shot and nothing happened to him. He was also stabbed with a knife and he was not bleeding or anything. Somehow he became a sort of animal or “demon” that eats flesh and had super strength that makes him even more dangerous. None of these have anything to do with having DID that's far from the truth. Just because you have the disorder doesn't mean you'll become a shapeshifting bulletproof person.
Finally, a person with DID is just like any other person although they deal with something that they can't control they shouldn't be treated differently. It is good to learn the facts about the disorder and not base it all on the movie. It is just a movie with misleading on the information on the psychological disorder.